Electronic Book Review - Storyspacehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/storyspace
enResistance Through Hypertext: ACTing UP in the Electronic Classroomhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/Net-worked
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<div class="field-item even">Laura Sullivan</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-11-06</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Rosemary Hennessy challenges progressive academics “to return cultural studies to the fundamental category of capital” (83). To do so will mean going against the dominant tendencies within a discipline which often “produces ways of understanding that exile meaning-making and identity in the realm of culture, sheltered from any link to capital or class” and thus “reiterate[s] a cultural logic that has been one of capitalism’s most potent ideological forms” (83). My work in the electronic classroom has tried to avoid the kind of cultural studies that Hennessy describes, even if many of her charges apply to dominant trends within electronic pedagogy. To use the Web and hypertext as sites of resistance, I believe, necessitates a critical look at the field of computers and writing. Most discussions of cyberpedagogy are not only celebratory; they also naively replicate the logic of contemporary capitalism. For example, as Hennessy notes, “knowledges that promote…neoliberalism” include “the advocacy of entrepreneurial initiative and individualism - in the form of self-help, volunteerism, or morality rooted in free will and personal responsibility” (78). One way that this neoliberal logic comes through in the discourses about electronic classroom experiences is in the emphasis upon the “empowerment” of students through, for instance, hypertext authoring and navigating, as if mapping one’s hypertext writing processes or choosing which paths to view were themselves inherently liberatory activities.</p>
<p>Michael Joyce, for example, often echoes this type of logic. Writing about Storyspace, a software program that enables hypertextual writing different from that on the World Wide Web, Joyce celebrates hypertext as a form for many of the same unmaterialist reasons as other teachers of electronic writing. <cite id="note_1">Storyspace is a text-oriented writing software program developed by Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce, and John B. Smith and marketed by Eastgate Systems (Douglas 175). Storyspace differs from the form of hypertext on the World Wide Web in the following ways:</cite></p>
<p><cite id="note_1">*Readers of Storyspace documents can add elements to the text.</cite><cite id="note_1">*Storyspace pages are connected in a myriad of ways, producing a textual arrangement that is exceptionally web-like.</cite><cite id="note_1">*Storyspace provides a graphic image of the “map” of the space as the reader has so far traversed it.</cite><cite id="note_1">*Storyspace “readings” change every time; the linked pages are not arranged in a fixed way/order.</cite><cite id="note_1">*Storyspace writings can contain “guardfields” - conditional links that specify that a reader must view a particular page or series of pages before the specified page or series will be available.</cite><cite id="note_1">There have been some complaints about the density of connections within Storyspace documents, for example, about some hypertext fictions that were created with this software and that contain hundreds, or even 1-2,000, links. For lucid, interesting explications of many such narratives, see Jane Douglas’s <span class="booktitle">The End of Books</span>.</cite><cite id="note_1">My point in this section is not to collapse Storyspace hypertexts and more traditional World Wide Web forms of hypertext into one, but rather to note that the politically problematic celebratory logic that is so common in discussions about the uses of hypertext operates in relation to both types of hypertext. It is also worth noting that Joyce rarely distinguishes between Storyspace and other forms of hypertext in Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics; in his book, Storyspace hypertext is the only form of hypertext.</cite><cite id="note_1">We should also note that many of the elements valorized by teachers in electronic classrooms also replicate the logic of distance education advocates.</cite> He reveres the way that hypertext creation enables reciprocity and the overturning of hierarchy. He asserts that “constructive hypertext,” because it “requires a capability to create, change, and recover particular encounters within a developing body of knowledge or writing process,” counters the presently “consumerist” nature of hypertext (101).</p>
<p>Yet, exactly how is Joyce using the concepts of “production” and “consumption”? Both occur at the level of the hypertext’s creation and reception; blurring these processes and making them collective is what makes hypertext progressive in the eyes of critics such as Joyce. While students do gain both knowledge and confidence in the act of hypertextual production, however, production in the wider sense is likely to be lost on them. The “consumer culture” that Joyce critiques involves more than just the passivity of typical hypertext reception which he contrasts to Storyspace’s capacity that allows readers to contribute additional input to hypertexts; its logic obscures the site of exploitation in capitalism: production and the extraction of surplus value. In the popular discourses about hypertext’s potential, class, as related to the structure of exploitative labor relations, is nowhere in the picture. Resistance takes place only at the level of signs, without their connection to the structures that produce both them and subjects.</p>
<h2>Writing through Media</h2>
<p>In this essay, I describe my experiences teaching a series of Writing through Media courses in the University of Florida’s Networked Writing Environment. <cite id="note_2">The demographics of both student and teacher are important to keep in mind. My current students at the University of Florida, the third-largest institution of higher learning in the U.S. with over 45,000 students, are generally of middle- and working-class backgrounds, predominantly but not exclusively white, with typically bourgeois ideologies and pretensions. They are almost always between 18 and 22 years old. In introductory level courses such as the one under examination here, I have never had what can be considered an “untraditional” student, a student who is older than her mid-twenties, or who is returning to school after raising a family, for example. Different configurations of student demographics would necessarily lead to a rethinking of the design of this course, which is an attempt to reach the students where they are at, so to speak.</cite></p>
<p><cite id="note_2">Moreover, at this juncture, I am still a student myself - albeit at an institutional level different from that of my students, as a doctoral student in a challenging graduate program. Nonetheless, I do believe that my own student status helps me more successfully teach this course. For one thing, I emphasize the common position of my students and me even while I acknowledge the differences. Also, my experience as a long-time activist in the academic labor movement, locally as co-chair of the organizing committee of our union, Graduate Assistants United (GAU), and nationally as 1998 president of the Graduate Student Caucus of the MLA (GSC-MLA), have served me well in the creation and realization of this course. In fact, one of the incidents pivotal to my understanding of this course and of the relationships between undergraduate students and academic labor occurred during a GAU Speak-Out on the Coalition of Graduate Employees Unions’ National Day of Action in February 1997. I was giving a speech, and many of the students in the first incarnation of the Media Activism course were sitting in the grass of the university plaza listening. When I looked at them, I found myself articulating the position that students’ work is labor and must be articulated as such in activist efforts. It was initially the realization that I cared deeply about these students that led me to continue developing this course and helped me to consider making the political economy of higher education its central topical focus.</cite><cite id="note_2">The point is not that one need be a graduate student to teach a course such as this with success, but rather that the subjective positions of both students and teacher come into play in the very design of the course. Furthermore, electronic pedagogues who occupy other positions than that of graduate student can still emphasize how they, as well as their students, are caught up in an exploitative institutional situation, even if differently affected.</cite> Drawing upon the teaching strategies developed by media theorist Gregory Ulmer, I use a series of media texts - both verbal and visual - as relays (or models) for designing another text. Focusing on political activism and mass media, students in my class examine such activist media texts as the videos of Paper Tiger Television; websites, letters, and stories of the Zapatistas in Mexico; media campaigns produced by the AIDS activist group, ACT UP; protest art, as exemplified in the book <span class="booktitle">Decade of Protest: Political Posters from the United States, Viet Nam, and Cuba 1965-1975</span>; public art activism, such as the National Clothesline Project; media campaigns related to the garment industry as detailed in the book <span class="booktitle">No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers</span>; and activist autobiographies, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal’s <span class="booktitle">Live from Death Row</span>. The class reads and views these texts and collectively extrapolates their hidden and unintentional “instructions” for our final projects, in which we design and invent a new form - the activist hypertext. Our relays suggest that, like the activists we study, students must bring to their hypertextual production both personal passion and information gleaned from research on their topics.</p>
<p>The course is centered around the political economy of higher education, as this topic is centrally connected to the material conditions of students’ lives, and as the hypertexts combine autobiography with activism. I want students to critique capitalism and its dominant ideological messages and to think through the ways that their personal beliefs and daily interactions are related to the socioeconomic structure. I require that their activist texts be concerned with some arena of higher education. In Freirian fashion, the content of the course and of student work is directly linked to the material conditions that influence students’ daily experiences (McLaren 143). However, while I create courses and assignments that encourage students to draw upon their personal experiences and that emphasize changes in student consciousness, I work to avoid the depoliticized version of Freirian pedagogy described by Peter McLaren:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Where Freire was implacably prosocialist, critical pedagogy - his stepchild - has become (at least in classrooms throughout the United States) little more than liberalism refurbished with some lexical help from Freire (as in words like `praxis’ and `dialogue’) and basically is used to camouflage existing capitalist social relations under a plethora of eirenic proclamations and classroom strategies (xxv).</p>
<p>In keeping with Freire’s activism core, I situate the course within a Marxist understanding of the central role of the organization of labor under capitalism. The contradictions of capitalism are especially evident in the educational system, not least in the daily frustrations experienced by our students. To try to help students connect these two realms, socioeconomic structure and daily experience, I provide them with information and with thoughtfully and collaboratively designed (hyper)textual experiments. I contextualize our own participation in a high-tech environment and share concrete information about the state of higher education, especially as relates to changes in the political economy. I lay out an explicitly systemic, i.e., Marxist, framework for making sense of this information. I design experimental electronic projects that enable students to explore - both analytically and emotionally - how deeply this exploitative system influences their daily lives.</p>
<h2>Context for the Course</h2>
<p>One of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism is that it does not - in fact, cannot - meet most people’s basic needs, either physical or affective. As a result, capitalism needs the production of ideologies that counter this fundamental aspect of this economic structure, or that, at the very least, rationalize the existence of what Evan Watkins calls the “throwaways” of society, “whole groups of the population who are being identified…as obsolete” (14). As Hennessy explains, “the success of neoliberalism is directly related to the triumph of ways of knowing and forms of consciousness that obscure its enabling conditions” (78). One popular strategy for concealing the effects of higher education’s increasing privatization originated in the 1990s and promoted a picture of the university as the unholy site that houses leagues of “tenured radicals,” to quote the title of Roger Kimball’s 1990 book. Hennessy describes how universities are depicted from this perspective: “as unorganized bastions of progressivism. Often represented as the last shelter of the fragmented left, universities have been linked in the public imagination with `politically correct’ challenges to traditional values” (78). This picture is not only highly distorted and inaccurate (Hennessy 78); it also prevents critiques of other political dynamics. For example, as Carol Stabile demonstrates, this focus on “political correctness” diverted the public’s attention away from the egregious actions of the Bush administration in the undertaking of first the Gulf War (“Another Brick”).</p>
<p>Administrators and politicians who design and implement the policies that govern institutions of higher education employ another currently popular neoliberal ideological strategy to deal with the changing role of such institutions. They capitalize upon the cultural valorization of the logic of individualism, the social Darwinist thinking that permeates political rhetoric and the mass media these days. Contemporary students often enter universities with the liberal belief that they can “get ahead” economically if they just “work hard” and apply themselves. They are rudely awakened, right away, at schools like mine, obscenely large research universities that routinely rush students through an ever-more-technically focused education. However, they are without any framework through which to interpret the discrepancy between their expectations and experiences. My course seeks to address this discrepancy and to provide students with explanatory models and ideas. I find the electronic classroom environment, and the hypertextual form in particular, to be especially helpful in achieving these pedagogical goals.</p>
<p>A course that asks students to investigate the political and economic dynamics of higher education needs to be based in an acute awareness of the positions within capitalism that college students currently occupy and needs to foreground these elements within the course itself. Students are caught up in the intensified squeeze on public services (including the tightening of budgets for public education), the increased downsizing and outsourcing, the global restructuring that involves the relocation of labor to the South and to the East, and the continually rising rates of unemployment. College students are positioned as both commodities and consumers. Universities increasingly view students as “inputs” and as “products” in an overtly corporatized model of how institutions of higher learning should function (Rhoades and Slaughter 39). Student credit hours become income generators, helping to secure more state funding, for example. While students are wooed as “customers” of the educational experience, with glossy brochures and resort-style preview tours, they are also viewed in objectified fashion as commodities themselves, as the shiny products of the rationalized learning experience. At the same time, students are viewed by capitalist corporations as a crucial, burgeoning market, as evidenced in the plethora of advertisements directed at young adults, aged 18-25. Commodities are offered as substitutes for agency - “freedom” is equivalent to the “freedom” to buy and the “freedom” of commodified style. (Reflecting this naturalized equivalency, one youth-oriented Tommy Hilfiger cologne is called simply “Freedom.”) Credit card companies barrage college students with their advertisements and “pre-approved” applications. I discuss these developments with students and ask them to consider their place within this picture.</p>
<p>This media activism course is also situated within the larger picture of resistance efforts that focus on higher education. Most models of academic labor activism neglect to consider the important role of undergraduate students in our struggles. Because our students are, like all of us, victimized by the slashing of funds to higher education in the U. S. and by the radical restructuring of the academy into an ever-more technically focused R&amp;D arm for the corporate sector, they make excellent allies in our academic labor efforts. To build an effective movement that cuts across all levels of labor at the university level, we must also include those whose labor is mostly invisible and unrewarded: our students. I designed this course - and the activist hypertext project that is the course’s central assignment - with these connections in mind.</p>
<p>I begin by reminding students of the social and economic context that forms the backdrop for our meeting in the electronic classroom. For the oppressive roles of technologies of cyberspace cannot be forgotten by progressive pedagogues who hope to utilize these technologies for ends more liberatory than those envisioned by transnational capital. A materialist electronic pedagogy should avoid technological determinism in both positive and negative senses, recognizing, as Jesse Drew points out, that new media technologies are always contested sites where there is a struggle between private and public interests. Cyberspace is such a site at this point in time, and the Web in particular is the place where commercial and public entities vie for control. Thus, using the Web for progressive projects does not occur in a vacuum, but rather occurs within the context of this larger arena of contestation. At a very basic level, dynamics of capital come into play in the very classrooms in which we teach, in the very fact of the access we have to technology that enables us to create and view hypertexts.</p>
<p>Computers are used in education to reinforce a cognitive psychological model and the logic of consumerism. Monty Neill explains that, “Cognitive psychology is more useful [than behaviorism] to today’s system, which needs workers to think for the system and to think differently, manipulating abstract symbols” (189). Writing in 1995, Neill predicts that computers will not be used by educational institutions to help students become adept at critical thinking, but will, instead, “produce the human as puzzle-solver” (192). He explains:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The McDonald’s level of familiarity with technology requires no actual knowledge of computers or much thought. Data-entry (with the computer monitoring your speed) and similar work does not require higher-order thinking. Schools will train students to sit in front of computers and do routine work in direct preparation for their jobs. For them, this will be their real-world learning connection (188).</p>
<p>My students read Neill and other critics who document the ways that capitalism is using computers in education and labor in order to maximize profits, so that in our course we do not replicate a naively utopian logic that promotes new media technology as a panacea for world problems. As with all contested technologies, there are uses of computers that are potentially progressive. In her trenchant analysis of the problematic nature of both technophobic and technophilic feminisms, Stabile reminds us that technology’s liberatory potential is historical; that is, such potential depends on how technology is situated within a social structure and towards what purpose it is employed (<span class="booktitle">Feminism</span>). I am interested in the way that technologies of cyberspace - particularly hypertext and the World Wide Web - can be used as tools to enable people to critique the existing society more effectively.</p>
<h2>Assignments</h2>
<p>The course addresses a central problem with which recent Marxist theory has been concerned: the role of subjectivity in exploitation and in superstructural mediations of the inequality engendered by the conditions of production under capitalism. From Louis Althusser to Fredric Jameson, Marxist thinkers work to articulate how oppressed subjects can act to change the world - the question of agency. Employing theories from both cultural studies and media studies, we problematize the mass media’s role in the ideological side of social control and investigate possibilities for resistance. Students study the media’s techniques of persuasion and manipulation, as well as activist attempts to use the media’s own conventions (such as those in advertising) for subversive ends.</p>
<p>Course assignments build upon one another throughout the semester and all assignments contribute elements to the creation of the final project hypertexts. The course is structured so that we address its two threads - higher education and media activism - throughout the term and then weave them together in the final hypertexts. I ask students to think critically and aesthetically at the same time, which requires a classroom environment that functions both as a seminar and as a kind of art studio where we bounce around ideas for textual design strategies as much as we consider the specifics of the activist causes that we study, including academic labor activism. I believe that encouraging each other to cultivate both our intellectual and creative capabilities, and our confidence in them, is crucial to any activist project. The assignments in this course - “Fragments of a Student’s Discourse,” advertisement analyses, research papers, and the culminating final project hypertexts - provide students with just such encouragement.</p>
<h2>“Fragments of a Student’s Discourse”</h2>
<p>The first assignment is itself the product of a heuretic method. As described in <span class="booktitle">TextBook</span>, an innovative composition and literature text authored by Nancy Comley, Robert Scholes, and Gregory L. Ulmer, we borrow the techniques used by Roland Barthes in his Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse to design something called “Fragments of a Student’s Discourse” (211-219). This exercise demonstrates in miniature how to use a text as a “relay.” We take the textual form of Barthes - his use of numbered paragraphs for each “figure” and his interweaving of personal reflections and experiences with references from cultural texts - and apply it to the realm of higher education and to the experience of being college students. The “Fragments” get us started towards one of the goals for the course and the final project hypertexts, to explore “how psychic investments are socially produced” (Hennessy 87). Student figures in these fragments’ assignment include such topics as “confusion,” “procrastination,” “insomnia,” “escape(ing).”</p>
<p>I also require students to put their “Fragments” on the Web, primarily so as to demystify hypertext and Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) at the onset of the term. Students typically enjoy writing these fragments, probably because these texts describe their own personal experiences and because they employ narrative and creative styles of writing. They also gain valuable confidence in their own abilities as creators of documents that employ HTML and are featured on the Web. Although these fragments are written individually, students view each other’s work on the Web, and, as a result, the documents come to be a kind of collective statement about the way that students’ experiences are not isolated or divorced from institutional organization. I want the students to begin to think that their struggles with school are not “just about me” - that they might be interpreted through frames other than that of personal inadequacy.</p>
<h2>Advertisement Analysis and Reworking</h2>
<p>The next assignment focuses on one of the primary types of media texts studied in this course, advertising. Young adult students are sophisticated analysts of advertisements, having been surrounded by such texts all their lives. Moreover, the dynamics of advertising are central to the ideological workings of contemporary capital and as such must be critiqued. At the same time, there are gaps within these texts that can be mined for more liberatory, perhaps even revolutionary, thinking. Finally, the logic of advertising is similar to the logic of hypertext in that it incorporates an emotional, imaginative, experiential dimension. We follow the practices of our activist inspirations by becoming skilled enough at decoding the conventions of media texts such as advertisements so that we can use these same conventions in a more subversive manner.</p>
<p>Doris Louise-Haineault and Yves Roy characterize advertising as a two-move endeavor, one in which the first move opens up possibility and the second move contains that possibility, redirecting it towards the only action possible in this discourse: consumption. So, to use Louise-Haineault and Roy’s psychoanalytic paradigm, if advertisements first stimulate desire, present problems, open up threatening “drives” and “phantasms,” appeal to the defenses of drives, and evoke subversive possibilities, they then contain and redirect desire, present solutions (in the form of consumption), contain threatening drives, comfort the viewer, and undercut any subversive possibilities suggested by other elements within them. I want students to study how this one-two strategy of advertising works; this assignment aids them in that task.</p>
<p>Stuart Ewen further articulates the nature of the “containment” performed by advertising. He explains that “the marketing of style, in its images, surfaces, and scents” promotes “not only a dream of <span class="lightEmphasis">public identity</span>, but it also plumbs the wells of <span class="lightEmphasis">inner identity</span> ” (106, original emphases). Along these lines, “Advertising…also contribute[s] to a restructured perception of the resources and alternatives [that] are available to people in their everyday lives” (Ewen 41). That is, in providing “a symbolic politics of transcendence,” the marketing of style “invest[s] purchasable commodities with connotations of action” such that</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">having</span> vies with <span class="lightEmphasis">doing</span> in the available lexicon of self-realization. Acting upon the world gives way to the possession of objects/images that suggest the qualities of active personhood…As a surrogate for action we are invoked to consume the symbols of action (106).</p>
<p>In other words, the commodity logic of contemporary advertising discourages people from acting to change social inequality; these days, consumers buy t-shirts that feature the red star of communism, as seen on western fashion runways, rather than organize for revolutionary struggle (Marasco).</p>
<p>In our culture, these hegemonic ideas and practices are offered especially to young adults and college students. Young adult students enter college already steeped in the ideology that style indicates identity and that the acquisition of material goods is the highest goal to which they should aspire. As students report that advertisements that address product quality (i.e., use value) are distant memories, hazy images from their early childhoods - in other words, given that my students only know <span class="lightEmphasis">exchange value</span>, that they consider the equation of image and brand to be normal, I want them to consider the ways that these exchange values are set up through the semiotics of advertisements that are specifically directed at them. They are savvy at unlocking the media’s techniques of persuasion and at using them to different ends. For this purpose, we study the techniques and texts of the group Adbusters. The Adbusters magazine and website feature conceptual and graphic critiques of contemporary advertising. Students are required to explore the <a class="outbound" href="http://www.adbusters.org">adbusters.org</a> Web site and to pay close attention to the design of the fake advertisements highlighted on this site in the “spoof ads,” “uncommercials,” and “culture jammers’ gallery” links. For example, one Adbusters creation employs the formal conventions of the Calvin Klein advertisements for Obsession cologne, but juxtaposes the product title and slogan “Obsession” and the beige and white imagery of the original ads with an image of a young woman leaning over a toilet. This image is simultaneously familiar and shocking, evoking the all-too-common problem of eating disorders amongst young adult women in industrialized countries and at the same time commenting upon the way that advertising and hyper-consumption contribute to distorted self-images and “obsession”-based diseases such as bulimia.</p>
<p>In this second assignment, students are asked to combine the critical insights of Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson’s book on contemporary advertising practices, <span class="booktitle">Sign Wars</span>, with the creative and conceptual designs of Adbusters. This assignment is also showcased on the Web, as the medium’s capability for displaying images comes in handy. As Sut Jhally documents, the design of advertising texts has changed. Jhally notes that advertisements of the twentieth century have undergone “two significant parallel developments”: “the shift from explicit statements of value to implicit values and lifestyle images” and “a decline in textual material with a correlative increase in `visualized images of well-being’ ” (22). This increased visualization lends itself well to an examination in an image-rich format such as hypertext.</p>
<p>This advertisement analysis assignment involves first a deconstruction of an advertisement’s ideology and, second, a reworking of the ad in the style of Adbusters. Students are asked to choose magazine advertisements that target college-aged readers. They describe the ad’s textual and ideological strategies. Their deconstructions investigate how their advertisement’s ideology both opens up progressive possibility and recuperates it at the same time. They critique the stereotypes promoted in their ad and also refute the stereotypes by drawing upon personal experience (and that of their college student friends). Finally, they produce some new version of their advertisement, one that provides an indirect and aesthetic critique that supplements their more straightforward deconstruction. Their insights in both aspects of this assignment are always quite impressive.</p>
<p>Many advertisements directed at college students rely upon the stereotype of the party-crazed, nightlife-hungry college student. Student Tim Oates deconstructs the stereotypical logic of his Balance Bar advertisement whose bold, large caption says, “The Energy for an All-Night Rave without the Embarrassing Jail Time for Possession.” As Tim notes, this ad presumes that students love raves, do illegal drugs, and risk being put in jail when they enjoy such activities. Tim’s reworked advertisement changes the product from a Balance Bar to a bag of crack; the caption now reads “The False Energy for an All-Night Rave without the Troublesome Money in Your Wallet.” His reconfigured ad spits in the face of the original ad’s designers, mocking the way that they use the logic of selling illegal drugs to appeal to a young adult consumer to entice her to buy their energy bar. The advertisement analyzed by student Jennifer Beck similarly uses the glamour of club culture to attract a college-aged viewer. The advertisement for Dolce &amp; Gabbana cologne depicts an image of a scantily clad young woman and man dancing, sweat pouring down their bodies. Jennifer analyzes the sexism, heterosexism, and other ideological strategies of the advertisement. Her reworked ad cuts through the idealized romanticization of casual sex promoted in the original advertisement; over the image of the two dancers, Jennifer has pasted text which reads, “According to the World Health Center 100 million acts of sexual intercourse occur each day. Do you really think that either of these models needs this perfume to help them out? Of course not, but you can still waste your money trying to emulate them.”</p>
<p>As seen in these examples, students are often especially skilled in their reconfiguring of advertisements. They take the logic of advertisements, which involves the transfer of meaning from one sign system to another in a decontextualized fashion (Goldman and Papson 15-17; 24), and turn it on its head. To underscore to students the violence enacted by these slippery transfers of signs, I show students the documentary film, <span class="booktitle">In Whose Honor: American Indian Mascots in Sports</span> (Jay Rosenstein, 1996). The documentary is a useful catalyst for a discussion of the way that stereotypes are embedded in our cultural symbols and are centrally related to economic concerns such as the drive for profits. Students understand that the conflict between American Indian activists, who view the sports symbols that feature Indians as oppressive, and university students and administrators, who view these symbols as harmless and “respectful,” as more than a difference in perspective. The latter groups of people do not acknowledge what the Indians contend: namely, that the taking of spiritual symbols and practices from their sacred, traditional contexts does violence to Indians in a deep way. In a similar fashion, the stereotypes about college students are pervasive in youth-directed ads, and students are often incensed by the blatant and obnoxious fashion in which they are objectified in these texts. In both cases, oppressive imagery is used to commodify experience and to help increase profits for the companies that market commodities that are seen to represent and to enhance a specific experience, i.e., the attendance of sporting events and life at college.</p>
<p>In the spirit of the Guerrilla Girls (whose images are relays for our final projects), students incorporate hard-hitting statistics into their ad analysis hypertexts. Often, encouraged by me to consider class in terms of labor, production, and profits, students cite information about a company’s profit margins and/or labor practices, in addition to pointing out the false promises promoted in the image-brand relationship that implies how the product will affect the life of the intended viewer of the ad. For example, student Amanda Norley analyzes an advertisement for Pringles’ Potato Chips. In addition to deconstructing the photograph and text of the ad, Amanda provides an asterisked “Pringles’ Ad Fact”: “With more than 3.5 billion U.S. dollars in its annual budget, Proctor &amp; Gamble (the maker of Pringles) is the biggest advertiser on the planet.” Another link informs us about the dangers of Olestra, the primary ingredient included in Pringles’ “fat-free” chips, including its potential to cause cancer.</p>
<p>Stuart Ewen notes that “commodified symbols of the good life” lead to a “tightening snare of credit and debt,” a world in which “all connection to society, or to social responsibility, is forsworn in favor of individual acquisition and display” (70). An increasingly prevalent development in what David Harvey terms the “regime of flexible accumulation” has been the rise in consumer debt - the ever-increasing encouragement to spend and consume in order to offset potential capitalist overproduction. In this context, credit card advertisements, as I mentioned previously, are ubiquitous in arenas both textual and physical that college students frequently visit, so it is not surprising that a number of students choose to deconstruct advertisements that offer credit cards. Student Katie Edwards, for instance, analyzes an advertisement for the CapitalOne Buxx credit card that features an image of a smiling, blond, young adult woman, and the caption, “TELL SANTA: `All I want for Christmas is a card.’” The ad continues, explaining to the parent(s) it addresses that the credit card is controlled through a parent’s bank account but available to students. Katie notes how the advertisement relies upon the rhetoric of pseudoindividualism and attempts to lure college student viewers to persuade their parents to get this card for them. Katie recontextualizes the ad’s ideology by placing a large block of text over the entire ad in her reworked version that says, “Nearly one-fifth of students that carry a credit card have accumulated $10,000 in debt.” This shocking statistic jolts the viewer from her attraction to the jocular tone and breezy, conversational style of the original ad and informs the viewer about the economic realities behind student credit card use.</p>
<h2>The Research Paper</h2>
<p>In this experimental class that provides such experientially focused assignments, we do not neglect the critical-conceptual level of thinking. Rather, we integrate critique, particularly in the final activist hypertext projects, with other ways of understanding (emotional, unconscious, associative). In researching and writing their papers, students become investigative reporters of a sort, a useful stance and experience for activist efforts of any kind. They uncover pertinent empirical information, which they will later interweave with their personal experiences and other impressionistic writings in their hypertexts. For example, student Dara Moreno, whose group project is focused on parking at the University of Florida, discovered that our institution makes over $1 million in parking tickets a year - over $600,000 of which is cleared as profit. Statistics such as these will help support the argumentative aspect of her group’s hypertext.</p>
<p>The particular research paper assignment that I give involves students writing for a fictitious academic journal called <span class="booktitle">The Journal of Media Studies</span>. The <span class="booktitle">JMS</span> has asked them to write an article that compares and contrasts “mainstream” and “alternative” media coverage of their topic related to higher education. I work to counter the more liberal version of cultural studies which operates through the combination of presenting cultural texts and teaching students how to “deconstruct” them immanently, or through setting side by side different readings as so many different choices in a consumerist model. <cite id="note_3">Hennessy drove home this point at a recent conference, the annual conference of our graduate student Marxist Reading Group here at the University of Florida (28-30 March 2001). During the discussion following a panel on pedagogy and cultural studies, Hennessy made it clear that we have to emphasize to students the importance of weighing different readings and their consequences in materialist terms.</cite> In these types of cultural studies teaching, so popular on this side of the Atlantic especially, teachers neglect to point out the implications of different readings. The position that Hennessy articulates offers a useful way out of this dematerialized approach. It is important to get students to think through the differences in different ways of reading, in terms of the consequences of the way that needs are met or not met. In order to implement this pedagogical strategy, again, we must have a Marxist sense of class. I tell students that in order to assess the degree to which the media sources they investigate are “mainstream” or “alternative,” “liberal,” “conservative,” or “radical,” they should ask: What are the assumptions of this text? Whose needs are being promoted? Who will benefit and who will be hurt if the policies promoted by this text and its ideology are implemented? The research papers provide students with practice in thinking critically, a skill I never want to neglect to nurture, even while I believe the electronic environment provides a space for us to indulge in the production of other kinds of knowledges in politically salient ways, too.</p>
<h2>Hypertexts</h2>
<p>I lead students in an experiment in inventing a materialist type of electronic writing, one that combines postmodern deconstructive strategies with a Marxist consideration of conditions of production and the place of education in evolving divisions of labor. In proposing this synthesis of postmodernism and Marxism, I work to avoid the blind spots of some orthodox versions of these theoretical positions. Linda Hutcheon explains that the postmodern study of representations is “an exploration of the way in which narratives and images structure how we see ourselves” (7). Yet postmodernism often ignores the economic dimension of experience, just as Marxism has struggled to theorize adequately the role of subjectivity in perpetuating capitalism. Jameson’s concept of “cognitive maps” is useful to overcome these theoretical gaps; a “cognitive map” is “that mental map of the social and global totality we all carry around in our heads in variously garbled forms” (“Cognitive Mapping,” 353). Stuart Moulthrop believes that we can use hypertexts to create cognitive maps to “begin to teach ourselves where we stand in the networks of transnational power” (par. 38). He points out that such an endeavor will involve</p>
<p class="longQuotation">reading and reworking the hegemonic messages of the mass media, such as the news. We require not only a sensitivity to the complex textuality of power but an ability to intercept and manipulate that text - an advanced creative paranoia. This must ultimately be a human skill, independent of technological “utterance”; but the secondary literacy fostered by hypertext could help us at least to begin the enormous task of drawing our own cognitive maps. (par. 38)</p>
<p>Moulthrop explains that this “secondary literacy” that hypertext enables is a return to print - in another form, an awareness of “the way texts-below-the-texts constitute another order behind the visible” (par. 36). I believe that such secondary literacy is promoted when students are the creators of their own hypertexts, especially when these hypertexts centrally feature an investigation of dominant ideology and its subjective internalization. In other words, we might think of the “cognitive maps” that hypertext helps us make as “another order behind the visible,” too. The activist hypertext projects require students to deconstruct ideological messages in dominant texts about higher education; such texts include entertainment narratives about the lives of college students (films such as <span class="booktitle">Higher Learning</span> and television shows such as <span class="booktitle">Beverly Hills 90210</span>, <span class="booktitle">Felicity</span>, and <span class="booktitle">The Real World</span>); advertisements directed at college-aged young adults; and news stories and articles about the changes in the structure of higher education at the turn of the twentieth century. I have found that focusing the students’ research and hypertexts on the arena of higher education makes it much easier for them to make connections among their own experiences and struggles, the ideological messages of the mass media, and the economic exploitation that undergirds the now overtly corporatized university system. These are the kinds of “cognitive maps” that I hope to see students uncover through the processes of research and hypertextual production.</p>
<h2>Postmodernism and Activism</h2>
<p>How do our activist hypertexts draw upon the conventions of postmodernism without becoming incapacitated politically? We have to reinvest postmodern theory and artistic practice with its original subversive edge. Linda Hutcheon describes the “mode” of postmodern texts as “complicitous critique” (2); what distinguishes the consciousness of postmodernism from the challenges to authority issued by the activist groups in the social movements of the 1960s is postmodernism’s acknowledgment of its own complicity with structures of power (10). Moreover, according to Hutcheon, the postmodern position is less oppositional and less idealistic than the predominant perspective in the 1960s (10). Hutcheon notes that “postmodernism is…doubly ambivalent, doubly encoded as both complicity and critique, so that it can be (and has been) recuperated by both the left and the right, each ignoring half of that double coding” (168). I wonder: can’t we acknowledge complicity with an oppressive social structure and at the same time still be quite oppositional towards that same structure? I resist the legacy of a more cynical postmodernism, one that views the “idealism” and “oppositional consciousness” of the 1960s as naive and as ultimately ineffective. Why not <span class="lightEmphasis">add</span> the understanding of complicity rather than <span class="lightEmphasis">replace</span> opposition in our activist efforts? I approach hypertext design and pedagogy with the idea of recovering this “double coding” that Hutcheon documents as integral to a politicized postmodernism. I encourage in the work of my students and me a simultaneous questioning of the dominant institutional power structures of the capitalist system and of the way that one is complicit with this same system. Holding critique and self-examination in tension is a productive way to illuminate the contradictions within the system as well as the contradictions within which we all live on a daily basis. Such an endeavor requires that we move beyond a postmodern view that has given up on agency - a view that understands activism as incongruent with the acknowledgment that subjectivity is socially constructed. Hypertext as a form enables these kinds of simultaneous investigations and the revelation of (often unresolved) contradictions.</p>
<p>Towards this end, I draw upon what Teresa Ebert calls “resistance postmodernism” in the way I design my courses and hypertext projects. Ebert laments the way that the postmodernism that has been embraced by the academy is typically a ludic one that “dematerializes” the sign (175) and that equates subjectivity with a Foucauldian idea of “the body” (234). Recognizing this ludic tendency within the U.S. academic left, Hennessy calls for us to reconnect “culture” with “capital.” This effort will require us to theorize about the way that subjective experience and identity are related to systemic dynamics.</p>
<h2>Hypertext and “Consent”</h2>
<p>Inspired by Ulmer’s description of the process of writing chorographically in <span class="booktitle">Heuretics: The Logic of Invention</span>, I help students come to understand the ways that their own thinking and beliefs are shaped from outside of them, and this understanding comes through the process of creating their activist hypertexts. As Ulmer explains, what guides the research of the creator of such a text</p>
<p class="longQuotation">is the desire to discover this place or chora of my own premises, the diegesis within which I have been thinking, presuming, the setting that has gone without saying but that has provided the logic of all my work. I want to write the diegesis within which my own grounding presuppositions might come into appearance. Then I will be able to <span class="lightEmphasis">write</span> judgment rather than only feel it or think it. (49)</p>
<p>Ulmer recognizes that one’s premises are, in this sense, socially formed, and that we need a new way of writing to help get at this socially grounded constraint on our way of viewing and experiencing the world. Ulmer’s “premises” and Jameson’s “cognitive maps” are elements of the social control by consent that Antonio Gramsci contrasts to social control by coercion. As Gramsci argues, in capitalism, “Coercion has…to be ingeniously combined with persuasion and consent” (310). How do we participate in our own oppression and exploitation? Rationally based theories only get us so far in answering this question; we need methods of textual production that help us uncover the role of emotions and intuition in our consent to social control.</p>
<p>Ulmer outlines how we can use electronic technology to invent methods of textual production that involve “the guidance of analysis by intuition,” which, “in contrast to analysis…may not be abstracted from the body and emotions” (141). Ulmer reminds us that intuition in this sense is social (141). Yet in bringing emotions and intuition back into the epistemological picture, we need to reconnect them explicitly to the economic realm. While Ulmer’s method is designed to <span class="lightEmphasis">reveal</span> the way that what is “outside” of us is also “inside,” McLaren investigates the <span class="lightEmphasis">causes</span> for the way that “our external and internal worlds seem to have been split apart” (xxv) from a more explicitly materialist perspective, underscoring the relationship between the contemporary configuration of capitalism and dominant emotional states. This understanding is useful to incorporate into my pedagogy, because I want to extend the Ulmerian goal of a method that draws upon intuition by helping my students create texts that contribute to transformations not only in subjectivity, but also in how we think about - and act towards producing - revolutionary social change. McLaren points out that “We live in unhappy times, in the midst of global hegemony based on fraud, when our feelings of unhappiness do not appear to be connected to the depredations of capitalist exploitation occurring within the external world” (xxv). Certainly, I find that my students are generally stressed out and unhappy, and, typically, they do not interpret these feelings and conditions beyond the framework of individualism that views the difficulties of college students as the result of personal shortcomings and failures. (As a graduate student in a greatly depressed labor market, I can relate to these feelings.) What are we to do with these feelings of despair and the corresponding feelings of fear and shame? The popular, depoliticized postmodern theory that has gained caché in the academy and in the capitalist mass media offer us similarly hollow answers - in McLaren’s words, “Our feelings are attched to the shimmering surface effects of signs and simulations and the dull radiance that illuminates the spectacles of the everyday”(xxv). I create courses and electronic assignments that encourage my students to view their emotions in a less superficial light. Thus drawing upon affective realms neglected by traditional pedagogy and research, we work to produce knowledge that comprises both the conceptual and the emotional/experiential - a task for which hypertext is especially well suited. In discussing how I implement a repoliticized postmodernism through the design of this course’s electronic projects, I will focus upon three of the dominant features of hypertext as a form: the combination of text and images, its linking capability, and its reliance on associative logic.</p>
<h2>Text + Image - Juxtaposition and the Recontextualization of Signs</h2>
<p>Hypertext supports writing with the language of advertising, for example with its combination of text and image - including words, graphics, and visuals, and with its use of color that helps to evoke a sense of “mood.” Many of the activists we study appropriate the graphic conventions of advertising and the mass media. ACT UP, for example, creates thought-provoking collages of text and image in its posters and fliers. Here is one powerful example. In one poster, the image of the staff and serpent, the symbol of the medical profession called a <span class="foreignWord">caduceus</span>, is featured below the declaration, “ALL PEOPLE WITH AIDS ARE INNOCENT” (Crimp 54). I discuss with students the connotations of this image: officialness, professionalism, credentialed power, safety, trustworthiness, honor, correct knowledge, and the like. Then we note how these connotations are undercut by the accompanying caption, which indicts the medical establishment for its judgmental and shortsighted response to AIDS. This text exemplifies the textual strategy of Barbara Kruger, as described by Kate Linder: “Seduce, then intercept” (17), which involves the disruption of stereotypes. The seduction comes through appealing to familiar stereotypes; the interception comes through a suspension of “the identification afforded by the gratification of the image” (Linder 29). In other words, viewers are initially drawn into the text by the familiarity of stereotypes, but unlike in mass media texts and images, particularly those of advertising, this identification is not used to encourage consumption, but is instead disrupted through a reworking and commentary on the stereotype(s) presented. We incorporate this Krugeresque strategy into our hypertextual advertisement analyses, as described above, and into our activist hypertexts as well.</p>
<p>Another primary technique of textual design that we appropriate from activists and progressive artists is the recontextualization of signs. For example, Kruger riffs on the Cartesian mantra in an image that features a hand holding a placard that reads, “I shop, therefore I am” (Linder 65). The AIDS activist group ACT UP created what Douglas Crimp calls “a Foucauldian twist” on Kruger’s text when they produced stickers and t-shirts with an image of a man’s hand holding a sign saying “I am out, therefore I am” (102-103). For ACT UP, this image serves to “turn […] the confession of sexual identity into a declaration of sexual politics” (Crimp 102). Reworking familiar sayings and advertising slogans is one way we entice viewers while communicating more politicized messages at the same time.</p>
<p>Hal Foster contends that complicity is a necessary component for deconstructive texts, arguing that the evocation of viewer complicity is especially crucial for certain feminist artworks: “If this work elicits our desire for an image of woman, truth, certainty, closure, it does so only to draw it out from its conventional captures, (e.g., voyeurism, narcissism, scopophilia, fetishism), to reflect back the (masculine) gaze to the point of self-consciousness” (8). Student Tiffany Tift employs this feminist-inspired seduction based upon stereotypes with its own undoing, in a brilliant recontextualization of a very familiar semiotic landscape: the women’s fashion magazine cover. Tiffany appropriates the conventions and connotations of this medium to implicate the discourse of romance and fashion in larger social trends of sexism; as Tiffany explains, she “created a <span class="booktitle">Glamour</span> magazine cover that `glamorized’ rape” (2). Simultaneously, Tiffany reveals and critiques the dominant responses to rape in our culture (including rape on college campuses, the subject of her hypertext), such as the “What was she wearing?” angle. Her cover seduces the reader with its typical-looking headlines and layout, the magazine title boldly printed across the top of the page, and a large picture of a scantily-clad female covering the background. The headlines look typical, but the content “intercepts” the reader’s initial comfort at seeing the familiar form:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Ask Yourself This: Do You Look Like a Victim Yet?<br />
How to Meet or Make Your Man the Rapist of Your Steamiest Dreams</p>
<p class="longQuotation">RAPElationships<br />
Help Fix Your Every Couple Catastrophe</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Really Special Section<br />
Get Raped This May!</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Question: Did You Ask For It?<br />
OF COURSE! See Page 69</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Pleasuring Himself<br />
What He’s Thinking When He Rapes You<br />
(Yes, the Details)</p>
<p class="longQuotation">69 Date Rape Looks<br />
including Rape-Worthy Lips &amp; Violating Hair How-tos<br />
Bonus! His &amp; Her Rape Poll Results</p>
<p>These headlines change the reader’s initial perception of the image, make her question the norms of the discourses of both women’s magazines and those surrounding rape, as well as point to the relationship between the media’s ideologies and gendered behavior.</p>
<p>Another provocative text that we examine to discern in order to adopt its poetics is an ACT UP graphic that relies on a provocative juxtaposition for its power and was included in the group’s indicting parody of <span class="booktitle">The New York Times</span>, appropriately titled <span class="booktitle">The New York Crimes</span>. In this simulated newspaper advertisement, an image of a gloved hand holding a syringe over a petri dish forms the background. The top of the image includes a quote attributed to Patrick Gage, president of the pharmaceutical company, Hoffman-La Roche, Inc.: “One million [People with AIDS] isn’t a market that’s exciting. Sure it’s growing, but it’s not asthma” (95). In case the reader-viewer misses the point, a caption along the bottom of the image reads, “THIS IS TO ENRAGE YOU” (95). This example demonstrates another “instruction” frequently found in the relay texts that we use for the course: find obnoxious quotes made by people in power that reveal the oppressive ideology and exploitative goals of capitalist institutions and let them speak for themselves. For even though ACT UP instructs the viewer as to the emotions the group hopes to arouse, the quote from the drug company executive is not combined with analysis or argument. I tell students what I have discovered through my own study of activist efforts and through my own research into the workings of the cosmetics industry: people invested in the incessant accumulation of profits - people who run corporations and countries - often are unabashed in their articulation of the exploitation at the heart of what they (are paid to) do.</p>
<p>This type of discourse is especially prevalent in what I call “industry literature,” the textual sites in which members of an industry speak to each other, rather than to the public per se. In the world of cosmetics, these texts include <span class="journaltitle">Inside Cosmetics</span> and <span class="journaltitle">Cosmetics World News</span>. In advertising, publications such as <span class="journaltitle">Advertising Age</span> reveal the goals and strategies of corporations and the advertising agencies that design their campaigns. What are the equivalent texts in higher education? Students are instructed to find out, and to discover how politicians and the people who run colleges and universities frequently lay bare the oppressive logic behind their policies, including their utter disregard for students, viewing them primarily as bodies to be moved in and out of school as soon as possible. Student Brooke Lebel did not have any trouble finding an exemplary quote from the then-president of the University of Florida, John Lombardi, when she produced her hypertext about rape on college campuses. On one page of her hypertext Brooke tells us that Lombardi said to the members of campus NOW, “I have money for a rape center - I just don’t want to give it to you” (“Suppression”). The reader is led through this quote to see the oppressive stubbornness that drives our university’s attitude towards rape on our campus and is thus incited to share Brooke’s anger at this situation.</p>
<h2>Linking</h2>
<p>How can hypertext further the effects of hard-hitting graphics such as those created by ACT UP? For one thing, we take advantage of the unique spatial and temporal qualities of hypertext, particularly its linking ability. We use linking to expand upon Kruger’s method, the “Seduce, then intercept” process (Linder 17). The two ACT UP images described above provide useful examples of how linking can help us to reconceptualize this technique. Fragmenting these texts, so that an initial screen shows only the image - of the medical profession or of the petri dish scientist, and then a link jumps to a second screen that contains the same image with the juxtaposed quotes, might lead the viewer to first experience the innocence of interpreting the images stereotypically, and then to have to rethink that interpretation upon viewing the next link.</p>
<p>Creatively using hypertext’s flexibility in terms of the order and arrangement of links can also add to the power of our activist hypertexts. Academic arguments, as well as print texts in general, are organized linearly. Contrary to many theorists of hypertexts who argue that hypertext is organized nonlinearly, George Landow points out that the primary characteristic of hypertext arrangement is its capacity for <span class="lightEmphasis">multilinearity</span> (4). I have found that there is something especially dynamic and powerful in the interplay between linearity and multilinearity in hypertext. That is, the creator(s) of the hypertext has more control over the order in which the reader-viewer experiences the “pages” of the hypertext (and also, therefore, over the degree of linearity and/or multilinearity of a particular hypertext or path of a hypertext). At times, this control can be exploited for communicative purposes - for example, in my first media activism course, one of the student groups chose to focus their hypertext project on the intelligence and I.Q. debates, involving views such as those expressed in <span class="booktitle">The Bell Curve</span> (Herrnstein). Their research revealed that the debate can essentially be boiled down to two sides: a “heredity” model - “people of color are biologically less intelligent than white people,” or an “environmental” model - social factors influence people’s intelligence levels, particularly economic factors, and given the correlation between social class and race in this society, the prevalence of lower I.Q.s amongst people of color can be explained by such a social analysis. In an academic paper, the preceding point would be articulated in linear, rational fashion, with an argument for the side being promoted built up through the accumulation of evidence. However, in the creation of their hypertext, these students took advantage of the spatial flexibility of the form, and they visually created the experience of these two sides to give their point of view through a spatial manipulation. They first lead the reader-viewer down a linear path, representing the “heredity” argument, with quotes from proponents of this argument and some historical background information. The reader-viewer has only one choice of a link on each “page,” if s/he wants to continue viewing the hypertext. On the first “page,” there is a brick in the background. With each succeeding page, the number of bricks increases, until the reader-viewer comes to a screen that depicts an entire brick wall, demonstrating these students’ opinion that the “heredity” view is a literal dead-end. Then another path opens up, the “environmental” view, and here a multilinear arrangement is deployed, in part illustrating the way that this view is much less restrictive and encouraging the reader-viewer’s own open-mindedness in relation to the issue at hand.</p>
<h2>“Multi-” Is Not Necessarily Liberatory</h2>
<p>Joyce proclaims that “the reciprocal power of the electronic book,” i.e., hypertext, means that we are “[f]reed from hierarchy to multiplicity” and therefore “might possess properties that we were only once the property of” (96). Not only does this view ignore the structural underpinnings of unequal, hierarchical social positionalities, it also obscures the way that the current formation of capitalism can tolerate, perhaps even needs, “multiplicity” and “reciprocity” of the type that Joyce celebrates. <cite id="note_4">When Joyce remarks that “Hypertext links” are “a conversation with structure” (94), he means the structure of the text, not social structure, as I am arguing for here. Although he is particularly interested in overturning traditional ideas of authorship, and in “empowering” student writers through practices of hypertext writing that blurs the boundaries between teacher and student as much as it does those between “author” and “reader,” the problematic nature of the class politics behind his formulations is nonetheless clear. After Joyce asserts that writing with hypertext might enable us to “possess processes that we were only once the property of,” he continues, “The groundskeepers might enjoy the landlord’s (or lady’s) favors, so to speak” (96). There is more than a little irony that this person who has become widely famous for his hypertext fictions and other writings compares himself in this passage to a ‘groundskeeper’ – in many circles, he is treated as if he is ‘the lord’ of hypertext. Moreover, the use of the figure of the landlord is ironic in that Joyce is one of the inventors of the Storyspace software program, marketed, like his hypertext fictions, by Eastgate systems. Storyspace is quite expensive (the cost prohibits many university computers and writing programs, including the Networked Writing Environment at the University of Florida, from employing it in their networks). Eastgate, as represented particularly by its president, Mark Bernstein, is a firm advocate of copyright of all things electronic, while there are many left digital artists and writers who vehemently oppose all forms of copyright.</cite></p>
<p><cite id="note_4">My overall point here is that the metaphors and arguments used to praise hypertext are often politically loaded and, at base, reactionary, belying the priviliged position of the scholars and artists who make these arguments and at the same time their own perpetuation of capitalist ideology.</cite> Hennessy reminds us of the specific types of knowledges that the contemporary service-oriented economy desires:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">What sort of consciousness is [required of the middle-class fraction of professional-service workers]? What are the qualities demanded of service workers? The answer reveals the degree to which new forms of cognition blur with new affective and physical demands on the laboring body. Service workers are primarily knowledge workers who need to be able to carry out multistep operations, manipulate abstract symbols, command the flow of information, and remain flexible enough to recognize new paradigms. Their work requires new affective and physical responses: habitual mobility, adaptability in every undertaking, the ability to navigate among possible alternatives and spaces, and a cultivation of ambivalence as a structure of feeling. (108)</p>
<p>Hennessy’s description contains many of the same elements that are qualities of hypertexts so unequivocally valorized by most electronic pedagogues. We must recognize that capitalism has plenty of room for flexible, fragmented subjectivities, a multiplicity of viewpoints, and multilinear textual forms. As a result, we must integrate systemic Marxist critiques into our strategies of textual production rather than presume that innovative features of hypertext that encourage these developments - fragmentation, multiplicity, and multilinearity - are already liberatory. I advocate and design hypertexts that juxtapose a myriad of voices - personal narratives, institutional voices such as those of schools or the mass media (Althusser’s “Institutional State Apparatuses”), unconscious voices such as those revealed in dreams, and critical voices that provide explanatory critiques, including critiques from a Marxist perspective. Heteroglossia in itself is not progressive; we need to move beyond positions of liberal pluralism by including Marxist critiques in our classrooms and electronic productions. It is true that hypertext’s fragmented nature, as well as the heterogenous and multilinear possibilities enabled by its linking capacity, can be very useful in the quest to use hypertext to help us reconnect culture and capital. However, in order to draw on the radical potential of these features of hypertext as a form, we must explicitly keep capital, and the critique of its operations, in the picture at all stages.</p>
<h2>Associative Logic: Collage, Montage, Simulation</h2>
<p>Hypertext is predicated on a logic of association, unlike formal academic writing (particularly in its most revered form, the essay), which requires rationally organized connections that build to a seemingly inevitable argument. As many theorists of hypertext from Vannevar Bush to Ulmer have remarked, hypertext can simulate the way consciousness, or mind, works through a logic of association, mirroring, for example, what Freud calls “dreamwork.” As alluded to earlier, this associative quality of hypertext enables the emotional, experiential, and sensory forms of knowledge which Ulmer associates with the emergent form of writing that can help us “map” the relationship between our personal experiences and identities, and social dynamics. Ideology itself operates through associative logic. Student hypertext producers take advantage of the associative, mind-like qualities of hypertext in three formats (which are often combined): through collage, through montage, and through simulation.</p>
<p>Early on in the semester, I explain three key terms, “juxtaposition,” “collage,” and “montage,” and give students a myriad of examples of artists and activists whose work employs these techniques. Juxtaposition involves combining elements in ways that produce a meaning beyond that of the individual elements. Collages are two-dimensional representations that typically juxtapose text and words. Collages that we study include the ACT UP images described earlier, as well as powerful images produced in the <span class="booktitle">Decade of Protest</span> book, which showcases posters, flyers, and other graphics protesting the Vietnam War. The book focuses on the texts produced in the U. S., Vietnam, and Cuba from 1965-1975. In class, we dissect many of the provocative posters in this book, examining a wide range of effective textual strategies. For example, we might discuss the relationship between text (words) and image, beginning with a poster from Cuba that contains no words at all. This print by the Cuban poster artist Fremez juxtaposes two images, one of a Vietnamese woman and one of an American model (75). The color red stands out from the yellow background, as the Vietnamese woman’s nose is bloody, the same shade as the model’s lipstick. As David Kunzle points out in the essay, “Cuba’s Art of Solidarity,” the contrast in this poster “not only subverts the imagery and strategy of much commercial advertising, but also Pop art, which celebrated the icons of corporate culture” (73). Other prints combine text and image in photocollage format, such as the American poster by Jon Hendricks, Irving Petlin, and Frazier Dougherty that shows a photograph of bloodied, dead Vietnamese people of all ages on a dirt road. The text at the top of the rather graphic image reads, “Q. And babies?” and the bottom text answers with, “A. And babies,” echoing the incredulity of the people who saw the images of the atrocities carried out by U. S. soldiers during the war, including the routine killing of civilians (35). Another powerful (and anonymous) U. S. poster mimics the conventions of print advertising. The text says, “It’s the real thing for S.E. Asia” and the centred image is of the mid-section of a Coca-Cola bottle; the label reads “Napalm” in Coca-Cola-style lettering, “16 FL. OZ.” beneath it. Beside the cola bottle are the words, “TRADE-MARK ® UNITED STATES.” Students cleverly appropriate the techniques of these politicized collages. For example, on one screen student Tiffany Tift imitates an advertisement for a drink special, a form with which college students are very familiar. The “advertisement” says, “buy 2 get 1 free!” and includes an equation: “2X [image of drink] plus [image of Rophynol pill] = RAPE!” This collage graphically echoes the bright colors and cheery typefaces and language of most drink special announcements and at the same time indicts the bar and club culture for its role in college rape situations that so often involve alcohol and drugs, including Rophynol, the “date rape” drug.</p>
<p>The linking quality of hypertext enables another kind of juxtaposition, more closely akin to montage in film. Montage is the technique of combining elements between frames as they linearly progress. The foremost theorist on the art of montage was the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who saw in the technique the possibility of opening up new intellectual and emotional connections previously unexperienced in the spectator. As creators of activist hypertexts, we draw from the kind of montage practices that Eisenstein recommends. For example, in our hypertexts elements are often juxtaposed in “collision” with one another, to borrow a term Eisenstein uses to describe his method of montage in film (37). The form works to produce contrasts, so that previous viewer comfort during scenes (links, frames) that depict dominant ideological positions can be undercut and shown to be complicit. One student group whose activist hypertext focused on the overall financial aspects of the University of Florida chose to foreground the montage potential of hypertext in order to produce contrasting “realities” about the university. They model their hypertext on an opposition: the university’s presentation of itself as a “resort” vs. the students’ experience of the university as a “factory.” The students use the resort metaphor in the part of the hypertext that resembles a promotional brochure put out by the university. In the links of this section, the students use bright colors, including yellow, orange, and blue (the latter two being the school’s colors), and imitate the sappy salespitch that the university gives to potential incoming students: “Our elite resort is a privilege to attend,” “an outstanding opportunity.” The text on the link entitled “Your Own Little Piece of Heaven,” announces, “Prepare to be mesmerized by the pampering and ONE-ON-ONE ATTENTION you are about to receive. Welcome to the University of Florida. Its Great to be a Florida Gator!” The glowing descriptions of university life as that of a luxurious spa experience are accompanied by glossy images of weight rooms and swimming pools.</p>
<p>The “alternative” version of the university likens the student experience to that of a factory, where students are just cogs in the larger assembly-line educational process. In this section of the students’ hypertext, the color scheme has been modified, featuring blacks and grays, and images of gears and wheels. On one link, the “factory” version of the university tour asks prospective students, “Are you a special machine? Something we should nurture? Something that deserves special treatment? What can you do for us?” and emphasizes the university’s desire to make profits through “special machines” such as football players. The implicit message of these university imperatives is spelled out in italics below, <span class="lightEmphasis">“Which side do you belong on? Shall we separate you as you separate yourselves? We watch our products as they develop. They are of the same factory, but all appliances are not compatible.”</span> The word “appliances” links to the next page, where we are told about the racism endemic to college campuses, where “Students disperse into ethnic separation, pawns in a massive chess game. They [administrators] manipulate the black bishop to the corner, the latino rook to the side, while they scoop the white king up into their pocket.”</p>
<p>Many student projects involve simulations of other experiences or texts and thereby take advantage of the associative dimension of hypertext in the effort to produce a text that reconnects cultural experience with dynamics of capital. Here are two particularly provocative examples. Jason Lam focused his research paper and activist hypertext on the controversial issue of distance education. Jason’s hypertext is a simulation of an online education experience. The title of his fictitious “school” points to the critical nature of his text from the start, “Alienation On-line University” (or, AOU). The first screen of Jason’s hypertext mimics the tone of the distance education celebrants in our country, with a bulleted list of links:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">* Take courses at your convenience * Get college credits without leaving home * Choose your own class hours * Interact with students just like you * Interact with a variety of diverse people</p>
<p>In successive links these promises are shown to be hollow. For instance, the link promising interaction forwards the viewer to a page with an image of a lone male student at a computer, accompanied by the caption “Social Interaction.” The “convenience” promised is belied by a lengthy list of very expensive computer equipment required to participate in AOU. Jason particularly targets the desire for profit that drives distance education enterprises such as AOU. One link features a playful yet sickening image of a young man at a computer - with dollar bills sprouting from his neck where his head should be. Jason has also included links to advertisements for corporations such as AT&amp;T and IBM that “sponsor” the school.</p>
<p>Another effective use of the associative capability of hypertext in terms of simulation is the student project on registration. At the time that the hypertext was produced, our university’s registration process was conducted using touch-tone telephones, not using the Web, as is done now. However, this hypertextual simulation not only echoed students’ non-computer registration experiences, but predicted accurately the experience of online registration that students now undergo. The second-person address of this text lends this hypertext intimacy, while its courier font lends it a sense of officialness and credibility. The initial page of this activist hypertext on registration contains a list of assorted classes from both the sciences and humanities. Many of the listed classes (for example, Poetry Writing) link to a page that tells the reader-viewer, “Sorry, no room. Try again later.” Along with the linked pages in which the reader-viewer “student” is denied admittance to any of her chosen classes, there are some successful attempts at registration, too, mostly for classes that are not desired by the student. <cite id="note_5">For example, the link for the Beginning Math class says:</cite></p>
<p class="longQuotation"><cite id="note_5">What do you know, you got in here, too! Maybe because the class meets at six a.m. Monday through Thursday, but you’ll be OK. Too bad that this class won’t count towards your major, but those are just details, right? As long as you get that Poetry class, everything will still be fine…</cite></p>
<p>After signing up for classes, the viewer is led through the rest of the simulated freshman’s initial experience. The “Day 1” page finds our freshman student lost and overwhelmed, “everyone seems just as clueless about the college environment as you do…Instructors, students, everybody. When you attended your first composition class, for example, there weren’t enough seats for everyone, and no one knew what to do.” The huge numbers of students in classes are mentioned, not for the last time in this project. As the “Not Enough Seats” page explains, “Yes, at every college and university in the land, a seating shortage exists. You’re lucky to even be <span class="lightEmphasis">enrolled</span>; it’s not uncommon for students to try semester after semester to gain entrance to a class <span class="lightEmphasis">that they need to graduate</span>!”</p>
<p>The experience of waiting in excessively long lines for hours - an all-too-common experience at universities of this size, as I can personally attest - is nicely evoked in this hypertext. The “Academic Advisement” page says, “The first thing you notice is that it looks like the people here have been waiting for a while” and contains a photograph of an anthropologist dusting off the bones of a skeleton, with the caption, “Line Forms at Rear.” A series of linked pages simulates waiting: “So, you decided to stand in line, huh? Well, since this virtual college experience is supposed to be lifelike in every way, you should now stare at a wall for an hour or two.” The shout of the administrator is echoed by the word, “NEXT!” at the bottom of the screen. The following page says, “Nope, not there yet…” and “NEXT!” Then, “Nope, you’re still not there. You have noticed a few inches of forward progress, though, so don’t despair!” and “NEXT!” Finally, “you” are chosen and progress to academic advisement.</p>
<p>Throughout the hypertext, provocative images are combined with clever and revealing text to get across the points of critique and to simulate students’ experience. One page says, “Feeling A Little Like A Piece Of Meat?” in large print across the top and features an image of large steaks. The text continues, “So, classes leaving you cold? Do your instructors know you by your name… or your social security number? Do you feel left out in the cold, like a face in the crowd, like another mumbling member of a great moving herd of college sheep? Well, you’re not alone.” The hypertext progresses to “the end” of the “semester.” Classes are evaluated; for example, the “Political Science” page reveals,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Well, things have been pretty hectic in Professor Smith’s class. Your midterm went well; the class average was a 51% and you got a fifty-three…a C+. You’ve attended every class, but the only thing you’ve taken away so far is that, according to the United States Government, communism is bad. All five hundred members of the class have been having difficulty adjusting to such a large learning environment, but that’s just about the way it goes, right?</p>
<p>This registration hypertext embeds within its simulation a scathing critique of the economics behind the important student issues under examination. The “Large Classes” page reveals that “mega-section” classes are offered because it’s more “cost effective” for universities, “[b]ecause The Administrators can charge the same amount per credit hour, regardless of how much the students learn.” The page called “The Conspiracy: Privatization” describes “privatization” as “the official name for the increasing number of college funding dollars coming from private corporations.” The more descriptive linked pages such as this continue to be accompanied by pages that simulate this “freshman” student’s experience, such as one in which “you,” the viewer-student, receives a letter from your economics professor inviting you to join that major. The balance of creative and critical voices helps to “reveal” the inner workings of the university and to connect these dynamics with student experiences. The “Shifting Funds” page deconstructs the Administration’s argument that “budgets are being cut in every department”: “What they neglect to mention, though, is that the cuts to `financially sound’ majors such as management and finance are more than made up for by grants to those programs from private industries and individuals.” The indictment extends to the government, which “offers funds to potentially profitable studies, including chemistry, engineering, and medicine. Investments in programs such as these yield such bountiful returns as improved chemical weapons, `smarter’ bombs, and advanced biological toxins.” Here, the student creators of this hypertext underscore the connection between military development and government-subsidized university R&amp;D. Finally, the hypertext announces that Business and Economics are not suffering from funding cuts, noting sarcastically, “Yes, this is where privatization works. Business students can’t help but wonder what everyone else is complaining about.”</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>Despite my many celebratory moves throughout this piece, I do see some problems with this course and its electronic assignments. One difficulty concerns the nature of activism. The course and the activists we study are easily distinguished from the current trend of “service learning” within the U. S. discipline of rhetoric and composition, a trend which to my mind is disconcertingly reminiscent of volunteerism and philanthropy. Some versions of service learning obscure what Jameson calls “the ideological content of philanthropy, which seeks a nonpolitical and individualizing solution to the exploitation which is structurally inherent in the social system, and whose characteristic motifs of cultural improvement and education are only familiar” (<span class="booktitle">Political Unconscious</span> 192). However, service learners are out there participating in community efforts, including activist efforts, and my students are not. <cite id="note_6">In fact, just naming the field as “activist” threatens administrators in a way that “service-learning” does not. The department evaluation of the syllabus for the most recent version of this course specified that “activist” elements, such as attending activist events, could not be required, because doing so would make the course “political.” This response exemplifies a current fad within conservative academic circles: the “accusation” that one is “politicizing” the classroom - as if the classroom is not already always political, and as if even the most formalist pedagogical approaches are somehow apolitical.</cite> I do offer extra credit to students who attend activist events and who write up a two-page response that links their experience to issues and debates that have centrally concerned the class. However, with so much reading, writing, and textual production already required for the course, students rarely go to activist talks or meetings. Do any of these students become more involved directly with activist groups and causes after the semester ends, I wonder? I do not know, as I have not tracked any students following the time of the course. Of course, I would like to think that some of them incorporate these ideas in a more substantial way and that some of them later go on to make activism one of their priorities.</p>
<p>Similarly, after teaching several sections of this course, I am still left wondering, Do the hypertexts produce transformations in class consciousness - in the student creators? in the reader-viewers? Students report that taking my class, writing their research papers, and creating these hypertexts causes their thinking to shift profoundly. However, the degree to which they view the world less through bourgeois lenses after these experiences is still unclear. This latter concern is related to the former - without direct contact with and commitment to local activist groups and efforts, how much can student views change during one semester? Nonetheless, I believe that this pedagogical experiment, and the electronic textual design project that is its center, make significant contributions to the efforts to think about how subjective experience, media messages, and socioeconomic structure interrelate, and they particularly move us forward in thinking about the radical potential of the Web and its ever-evolving textual form, hypertext.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Abu-Jamal, Mumia. <span class="booktitle">Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience</span>. Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing House, 1997.</p>
<p>Abu-Jamal, Mumia. <span class="booktitle">Live from Death Row</span>. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.</p>
<p>Bérubé, Michael, and Cary Nelson, eds. <span class="booktitle">Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities</span>. New York: Routledge, 1995.</p>
<p>Brook, James and Iain A. Boal, eds. <span class="booktitle">Resisting the Virtual Life : The Culture and Politics of Information</span>. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995.</p>
<p>Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” <span class="booktitle">From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine</span>. Eds. James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn. New York: Academic P, 1991. 85-110.</p>
<p>Crimp, Douglas. With Adam Rolston. <span class="booktitle">AIDS Demo/graphics</span>. Seattle: Bay P, 1990.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Decade of Protest: Political Posters from the United States/Viet Nam/Cuba 1965-1975</span>. Santa Monica: Small Art P, 1996.</p>
<p>Douglas, J. Yellowlees. <span class="booktitle">The End of Books - or Books without End? Reading Interactive Narratives</span>. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.</p>
<p>Drew, Jesse. “Media Activism and Radical Democracy.” Brook and Boal 71-83.</p>
<p>Ebert, Teresa. <span class="booktitle">Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism</span>. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.</p>
<p>Eisenstein, Sergei. <span class="booktitle">Film Form</span>. Trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949.</p>
<p>Ewen, Stuart. <span class="booktitle">All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture</span>. New York: Basic Books (Harper Collins), 1988.</p>
<p>Foster, Hal. <span class="booktitle">Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics</span>. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985.</p>
<p>Goldman, Robert and Stephen Papson. <span class="booktitle">Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising</span>. New York: The Guilford P, 1996.</p>
<p>Gramsci, Antonio. <span class="booktitle">Selections from the Prison Notebooks</span>. (1929-1935). Eds. and Trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publications, 1971.</p>
<p>Harvey, David. <span class="booktitle">The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change</span>. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 1989.</p>
<p>Hennessy, Rosemary. <span class="booktitle">Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism</span>. New York: Routledge, 2000.</p>
<p>Herrnstein, Richard J. <span class="booktitle">The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life</span>. New York: Free P, 1994.</p>
<p>Hutcheon, Linda. <span class="booktitle">The Politics of Postmodernism</span>. London: Routledge, 1989.</p>
<p>Jameson, Fredric. <span class="booktitle">The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act</span>. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1981.</p>
<p>Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” <span class="booktitle">Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture</span>. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 347-360.</p>
<p>Jhally, Sut. <span class="booktitle">The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society</span>. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1987.</p>
<p>Joyce, Michael. <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics</span>. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.</p>
<p>Kimball, Roger. <span class="booktitle">Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education</span>. New York: Harper &amp; Row, 1990.</p>
<p>Kunzle, David. “Cuba’s Art of Solidarity.” <span class="booktitle">Decade of Protest</span>. 72-73.</p>
<p>Lam, Jason. “Alienation On-line University.” Summer 1998.</p>
<p>George Landow. <span class="booktitle">Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Theory and Technology</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1992.</p>
<p>LeBel, Brooke. “Suppression.” <a class="outbound" href="http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~sullivan/F97/blebel/hypertext.html">http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~sullivan/F97/blebel/hypertext.html</a>. 21 December 2000.</p>
<p>Linder, Kate. <span class="booktitle">Love for Sale: The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger</span>. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990.</p>
<p>Marasco, Robyn. “Crisis, Culture, and Consumption: The Commodification of Dissent in Late Capitalism.” <span class="journaltitle">Third Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group</span>. University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. 30 March 2001.</p>
<p>Martin, Randy, ed. <span class="booktitle">Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University</span>. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1998.</p>
<p>McLaren, Peter. <span class="booktitle">Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution</span>. Lanham, MD: Rowman &amp; Littlefield, 2000.</p>
<p>Moulthrop, Stuart. “You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media.” <span class="journaltitle">Postmodern Culture</span> 1:3 (May 1991). <a class="outbound" href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.3moulthrop.html">http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.3moulthrop.html</a>. 21 December 2000.</p>
<p>Neill, Monty. “Computers, Thinking, and Schools in the `New World Economic Order.’” Brook and Boal 181-194.</p>
<p>“Registration.” Student Project Summer 1998. <a class="outbound" href="http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~sullivan/band4/registration.html">http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~sullivan/band4/registration.html</a>.</p>
<p>“Resort vs. Factory.” Student Project Summer 1998. <a class="outbound" href="http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~sullivan/band1/tour.html">http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~sullivan/band1/tour.html</a>.</p>
<p>Rhoades, Gary and Sheila Slaughter. “Academic Capitalism, Managed Professionals, and Supply-Side Higher Education.” Martin 33-68.</p>
<p>Ross, Andrew, Ed. <span class="booktitle">No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers</span>. London: Verso, 1997.</p>
<p>Scholes, Robert, Comley, Nancy, and Ulmer, G.L. <span class="booktitle">TextBook: An Introduction to Literary Language</span>. New York: St. Martin’s P, 2nd Ed., 1995.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiques of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation</span>. New York: Monthly Review P, 1995.</p>
<p>Stabile, Carol. “Another Brick in the Wall: (Re)contextualizing the Crisis.” Bérubé and Nelson 108-125.</p>
<p>Stabile, Carol. <span class="booktitle">Feminism and the Technological Fix</span>. Manchester, UK: Manchester U P, 1994.</p>
<p>Tift, Tiffany. “Eyes Wide Open.” <span class="booktitle">Hypertext Project: Rape on College Campuses</span>.</p>
<p>—. “Final Project Evaluation.” 23 April 1999. Course assignment.</p>
<p>Ulmer, Gregory L. <span class="booktitle">Heuretics: The Logic of Invention</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1994.</p>
<p>Watkins, Evan. <span class="booktitle">Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education</span>. Stanford, CA: Stanford U P, 1993.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/writing-studies">writing studies</a>, <a href="/tags/pedagogy">pedagogy</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-joyce">michael joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/jay-bolter">jay bolter</a>, <a href="/tags/george-landow">george landow</a>, <a href="/tags/storyspace">Storyspace</a>, <a href="/tags/cultural-studies">cultural studies</a>, <a href="/tags/act">ACT UP</a>, <a href="/tags/adbusters">adbusters</a>, <a href="/tags/advertising">advertising</a>, <a href="/tags/frederic-jameson">frederic jameson</a>, <a href="/tags/cognitive-mapping">cognitive mapping</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator895 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comBefore and After the Web: George P. Landow (interviewed by Harvey L. Molloy)http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/uncenterable
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">George Landow</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-09-13</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="longQuotation">George P. Landow is Professor of English and Art History at Brown University. This interview was conducted while he was on leave from Brown University and was Shaw Professor of English and Digital Culture and Director of the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore. His books on hypertext and digital culture include <span class="booktitle">Hypermedia and Literary Studies</span> (MIT, 1991), and <span class="booktitle">The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities</span> (MIT, 1993) both of which he edited with Paul Delany, and <span class="booktitle">Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</span> (Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), which has appeared in various European and Asian languages and as <span class="booktitle">Hypertext in Hypertext</span> (Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), a greatly expanded electronic version with original texts by Derrida, reviews, student interventions, and works by other authors. In 1997, he published a much-expanded, completely revised version as <span class="booktitle">Hypertext 2.0</span>. He has also edited <span class="booktitle">Hyper/Text/Theory</span>. (Johns Hopkins UP, 1994).</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Harvey L. Molloy is an Assistant Professor in the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research interests include information design and digital arts. He has seven years experience in the design industry working as an information designer and has worked for clients in the diverse fields of telecommunications, finance, education and the arts. He is currently the Programme’s Web editor.</p>
<h2>The Web and Hypertext</h2>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> During the 90s, the Web came to dominate how we think about hypertext. What do you think about this domination?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> As someone who believes that the model of networked - i.e. uncentered, nonhierarchical - digital technology offers important potential for education, educational institutions, scholarly and creative work, and society as a whole, I am fascinated and delighted by the way the Web has taken hold. As someone who came from the pre-Web hypertext community, I am saddened that people have had to settle for such an impoverished version of hypertextuality.</p>
<p>When I look back upon the history of hypertext, I realize that WWW is a kind of latter-day Hypercard in disseminating the idea and use of this kind of infotech: Like Hypercard, which came into being only after dozens of far richer systems had appeared, it appears free and extraordinarily easily to use. Of course, as soon as one tries to do anything rich and strange with either HTML or Hypercard, one begins to experience it much as boat owners tell me one experiences owning a sail boat - as a giant hole into which one pours unlimited time and money.</p>
<p>The lesson of both Hypercard and WWW seems to be that this misleadingly easy first experience leads to great success; the lesson of WWW seems to be that the networked model - this first step towards Nelson’s Docuverse - matters more than anything else.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> What are the limitations of HTML and the Web?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> Essentially HTML is a very basic formatting language that looks virtually identical to all the old mainframe and DOS word-processing software - IBM Script, Zywrite, and so on - to which have been added the capacity to add links and images. Adding these two features was an act of genius. Basic HTML is extraordinarily easy to use, and with decent HTML editors, such as BBEdit, Dreamweaver, and Homesite, very easy to use for large projects or sites, using Eastgate Systems Storyspace 2.0 one can even create giant, multi-directory sites, and export them into usable HTML with fairly little effort. So getting started is fairly easy today, as any 12 year-old knows.</p>
<p>The Web today has at least three main deficiencies: First, digital textuality is essentially dynamic; HTML, like its richer predecessor and model, SGML, is suited chiefly to static texts that are created, formatted, and frozen. The very use of the term “homepage,” which derives from a very different world of print, immediately suggests both the difficulties of the technology and the way new users come to it with incorrect - and very limiting - paradigms. HTML and currently available browsers lack some key features that make maintaining any dynamic Web site very time-consuming and therefore expensive.</p>
<p>Second, and related to this last point, is the absence of two defining features of true hypertext - (1) one-to-many linking and (2) automatically generated menus of links available when one clicks on any link-anchor. The first feature, the capacity to attach multiple links to any point in the text or image, creates a vastly richer sense of hypertextuality; in fact many students who learn about hypertext first from an experience of Storyspace, Microcosm, or other systems, find they cannot translate their work into HTML because the Web is “so much flatter,” as they put it, than other forms of hypertext.</p>
<p>In my experience, the second feature, link menus automatically generated by the system, saves much more than half the time and effort required to manage a dynamic site. My sites now comprise more than 42,000 documents and images, and they grow daily. Each time a new document comes to the <span class="booktitle">Victorian Web</span>, I have to do two things: First, I have to format it, which is fairly easy since one can use existing documents as templates for the new one. Second, and much more time-consuming and prone to error, I have to add links to the new doc from as many as six other menus, each of which has to be maintained manually. When one of my contributing editors from Canada (whom, incidentally, I have never met) e-mails an essay on Hardy and Conrad’s use of Miltonic imagery and its relation to their fundamental ideas, links have to be added to the literary relations overviews for each author as well as similar documents for imagery and themes. In richer forms of hypertext, one simply adds a link to each subject heading in each author’s overview using point-and-click techniques; in HTML, one has to edit six documents manually. What a lot of work!</p>
<p>A final problem exists in the instability of the Net. Ideally, one should be able to link to many other Web sites. In fact, painful experience proves that a large number of Webmasters, particularly graduate students, who request links to their sites, move or shut down their sites without warning, and server names seem to change at an astonishing rate, thereby breaking links. This fact means that one of the Web’s greatest promises - a true Nelsonian Docuverse - hasn’t been fulfilled.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> Do you think that the Web will continue to hold this dominant position? Do you think that future developments in markup languages - such as XML - will allow the Web to fulfill some of the visionary potential of hypertext as imagined by Bush and Nelson?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> According to people close to the latest developments in XML, it will have the strengths of SGML – essentially, tags describe a text element, such as a paragraph or book title, and one decides on formatting them from a central location. It also seems as if the Xlink protocols will finally give us one-to-many linking; now it’s up to Microsoft and Netscape to produce decent browsers that will support such features. If they do, the Web world could change at light speed.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> Is there a danger that students and researchers will forget the power of other hypertext systems due to the dominance of the Web?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> No, I think the danger is that the great majority of students and researchers never even <span class="lightEmphasis">learn</span> about other systems. For someone involved in the field since 1986 or ‘87, one of the most painful (or pathetic) things about much Web-based research projects in Computer Science is seeing people duplicate research done much earlier – often on things that proved to be complete dead-ends. Oh well, it keeps them off the street.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM</span>: In <span class="booktitle">Hypertext 2.0</span> you noted that “Hypertext also offers a means of experiencing the way a subject expert makes connections and formulates inquiries” (226). How does the Web fare in fulfilling this potential?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> Here I think the Web does an excellent job. The ease with which one can create what are essentially links to a glossary permits beginners to read with the help of expert readers - when they wish to do so.</p>
<h2>The Web and Education</h2>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> The <span class="booktitle">Victorian Web</span> began as a Storyspace web - what was your experience in converting the <span class="booktitle">Victorian Web</span> from Storyspace to HTML? What were the effects of this change for authors and readers of the <span class="booktitle">Victorian Web</span>?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> First, an enormous amount of work, which continues on a daily basis. Second, an enormously larger audience that is now around a combined 7-8 million hits/month on my two sites (in Singapore and in the US). Third, as a result of the last effect, contributors to the <span class="booktitle">Victorian Web</span>, chiefly faculty members at other institutions and a few graduate students, have increased enormously. We now have around 500 faculty authors, and in the Victorian Web Books section, which consists of HTML translations of central books in the field, we now have a dozen important books originally published by Cornell, North Carolina, Oxford, Routledge, Princeton, Texas, and Yale UP. None of this could have happened without something like the Web.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> What’s interesting to me about the <span class="booktitle">Victorian Web</span> and the <span class="booktitle">Hypertext and Critical Theory Web</span> is that you don’t readily distinguish between student authors and established academic writers. Students are effectively engaged in scholarly research projects. Is hypertext unique in allowing students to become active researchers?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> Two comments: first, each <span class="lightEmphasis">does</span> distinguish between undergraduate, postgraduate, and faculty contributors – at least to the extent that each byline indicates the status of the author. It does not distinguish among them to the extent that faculty and students or members of the general public comment upon one another’s work.</p>
<p>Second, as so many other educational and cultural effects, hypertext makes vastly easier something theoretically possible earlier and occasionally practiced.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> In Hypertext 2.0 you wrote that “Hypertext, by holding out the possibility of newly empowered, self-directed students, demands that we confront an entire range of questions about our conceptions of literary education” (219). What’s your evaluation of the humanities’ response to this possibility?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> Qualified medium-range optimism, I guess. Many young teachers immediately saw the possibilities of the Web and other forms of hypertext. For example, using both Storyspace and HTML, Massimo Riva of Brown constructed the massive bilingual <span class="booktitle">Decameron Web</span> with contributions from students and scholars from the USA and Italy. Interestingly enough, scholars working in the fields concerned with earlier literatures - Greek and Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Irish, Old Norse, and so on - led the way whereas those in contemporary literature, film, and video often refused even to consider the possibilities of digital technologies. Brown’s Department of Modern Culture and Media, which for almost a decade acted as if all media ended with television and video, blocked several attempts to have an official program or major in digital culture. In my own department, the medievalists and renaissance scholars have long been immersed in computing, but I have never been able to get those in the romantic and Victorian periods, including our chair, to look at the Victorian Web, much less use it for their courses or contribute to it themselves. As soon as I went on leave to come to the National University of Singapore, my department stopped teaching my hypertext courses, even though there are quite a few people who could have kept them going. The Old Guard, the Old Fellas (which in this case includes a large number of women), don’t see what this stuff has to do with an English Department.</p>
<p>My off-the-cuff explanation is that although all modern education is based chiefly upon book technology, those working in earlier fields know the texts that they study and teach bear the marks of scribal, oral, and pre-print infotech; those who work in later fields are so inside the Gutenberg galaxy (as McLuhan called it) that they see anything else as fundamentally anticultural.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> Do you think that there’s a danger that many teachers in humanities see hypertext as being about computers rather than being a means to do research?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> Yup. At the very least, they should be leading their students to learn how to evaluate the quality of information. Of course, since most secondary school teachers and college instructors today themselves don’t know how to do research in traditional libraries, they can’t extend these skills to the Net.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> What are some of the issues that need to be considered by Web publishers who want to create online editions of out-of-print books? How do footnotes, references and bibliographies work when a text is moved from print to hypertext?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> Since not all users have broadband access to the Internet, avoid adding links to notes where possible by using the following rules: First, all substantial notes should be given titles and treated as separate documents; second, incorporate as many brief comments and notes as possible into the main text; third, for bibliographical information include a list of works cited at the foot of each individual lexia (document) and then use the MLA short form of in-text citation, which means in practice that you only use as much info in the parenthetical reference as is absolutely necessary. Thus, if you introduce quoted material by “According to Spurgeon’s “Christ the Lord,” you only need a page number: “quoted text” (34). If, however, you wrote, “According to a Victorian preacher… ” you’d have to provide the necessary information in full: “quoted text” (Spurgeon, “Christ the Lord,” 34).</p>
<p>Most of the preceding recommendations, you’ll notice, come straight from the best of current book publishing practice. The problem is that many print publishers, including leading academic ones, have incompetent manuscript editors or inadequate house styles. Thirty-five years ago I was told by editors of leading journals and presses (a) not to use things like “Ibid.” or “Op. Cit.,” and (b) never to use unnecessary notes, but I still come upon books like Timothy Hilton’s fine biography of John Ruskin, the second volume of which Yale University Press published last year, that has pages and pages of tiny endnotes with Ibid. and page numbers. A good three-quarters of the endnotes, which are not easy to use in a massive volume, are useless. The lesson here is that one can get by with incompetent manuscript preparation in print, but such poor quality in a Web doc would be a disaster for readers, quickly training them not to follow <span class="lightEmphasis">any</span> links!</p>
<p>The more interesting problems, which we face all the time in the Victorian Web Books - <a class="outbound" href="http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/victorian/misc/books.html">http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/victorian/misc/books.html</a> - include: (a) what to do with information created, even by the same author, since the book first appeared, (b) how does one add value with links to material not in the original book, and (c) how does one both preserve the text-as-a-book and make it function effectively as a digital text with permeable borders. Finally, can some of the solutions I’ve tried in the <span class="booktitle">Victorian Web</span> be carried out algorithmically?</p>
<h2>Power, Authority, Control, and the Web</h2>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> In your introduction to the 1994 collection of essays <span class="booktitle">Hyper/Text/Theory</span> that you edited you wryly observed that the humanities excels in “finding mice in molehills.” Do you think that by subscribing to the narrative that the utopian idealism of the early 90s has now been superceded by systems of control and the search for the e-dollar that the humanities finds a late capitalist mouse in a cyberspace molehill? Has utopianism about the Web been replaced by a proliferation of technocapitalism and cybernetic governmentality?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> Although a certain cyber-utopianism has disappeared as a general characteristic of those involved in the Web, this change has happened in large part because new people with non-utopian goals have quite properly tried to earn a living with the new technology. I don’t see anything wrong in people trying to make money from doing things that other people need or want (not the same thing). At the same time at lot of people see the Web as a new virtual place of freedom. I find wonderfully encouraging the Web public’s refusal to accept channels and other attempts to turn hypertext into television. Michael Joyce’s brilliant challenge thus far has rung true: “Hypertext is the revenge of text upon television.” If it turns out that the most successful way to make money from the Net is business-to-business sales, a few consumer fields, such as music distribution, and the like - that’s fine. None of this drives out more experimental writing and the like.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> While there has been a rise in cybergovernmentality, there also been a proliferation of free Web-hosting, free email services, free egroups, free Web logs. It’s never been so easy to publish your own material. Do you think that this is significant? Does the rise of these services have implications for teaching and research?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> Yes, we find ourselves in a situation of creative anarchy, and, like everyone else, I’m waiting to see how things will shake out and down. I also wonder how long services will remain “free,” or if certain aspects of Internet culture will eventually become a kind of inalienable right. It is also possible that, like broadcast TV, such free services will come at the expense of advertisements, in which case skilled reading will involve becoming blind to commercial enticements.</p>
<p>Certain obvious implications have already been realized: my students in Singapore, like those in the US, often develop their work on their own servers, rather than in (and on) University facilities. In addition, the ability to publish anything makes something like a conventional publisher, who selects, regularizes, and advertises, even more important. I don’t think the Web is the death of publishers - just the death of those who insist on remaining clueless.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> In <span class="booktitle">Hypertext 2.0</span> you argued that “Like other forms of technology, those involving information have shown a double-edged effect, though in the long run - sometimes the run has been very long indeed - the result has always been to democratize information and power” (276). What are some of the dynamics at work which result in this greater democratization?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> Although clearly many factors are involved, the single most important one, I believe, is the replacement of hierarchy by the uncenterable network. That makes top-down control difficult; hierarchy and lack of transparency almost unworkable; choice inevitable.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> Let’s talk a little about the issue of surveillance and openness. The extent to which Web surveillance has increased surely depends on very local issues. What do you see as the impact of the Web within Singapore and throughout the entire South-East Asia region?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> Key issues include (a) literacy, without which accessibility means nothing, (b) access to networked computers, and (c) access to high-speed networks. Much of the population of Singapore has more of these three capacities than most of Europe and America, and vastly more than their neighbors in the region, or countries in South America and Africa.</p>
<p>By announcing recently that Internet service providers are not legally liable for material their customers place on their webservers, the Singapore government took a giant step towards an open society. I have no idea how much Web surveillance actually happens here or throughout the world, though it seems to me that most of it takes a commercial turn, with merchandisers compiling elaborate profiles, which they then exchange with other commercial and possibly governmental entities.</p>
<p>I also don’t have a clear idea of how much surveillance is in fact possible. We all know stories of the Jet Propulsion Lab storing incredible amounts of data sent back by unmanned space vehicles because they don’t have capacities to process it. Even given the resources of NSA and the CIA, I wonder much they can accomplish with the vastly larger amounts of data that pour in from spy satellites, web crawlers, and the like. Singapore has only 3 million people, so the task would be easier <span class="lightEmphasis">if</span> one had access to the same resources.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> How do you see copyright issues impinging on online publication and scholarship?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> Back somewhere around 1987, the Annenberg/Corporation for Public Broadcasting assembled about a dozen people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and asked us what would be needed to make hypertext fulfill its potential as an educational and cultural force. Everyone agreed that the hardware and software will take care of themselves; the one factor that we had to work for was a new conception of copyright that involved something like leasing information for a tiny expenditure - Ted Nelson’s vision, of course. Since then nothing has changed.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, too many of the judges and lawmakers who consider such issues throughout the world do not understand networked digitech. Worse, not realizing that many of their conceptions of intellectual property are print based, they assume their notions of intellectual property are universal. Of course, as many students of copyright law have pointed out, in the commercial world large corporations protect their ideas by means of secrecy, not copyright.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">HM:</span> What are some of the new issues in hypertext? What would you need to cover if you were writing <span class="booktitle">Hypertext. 3.0</span>?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">GL:</span> The short answer is that if I knew, I’d be writing <span class="booktitle">Hypertext 3.0</span> right now. The longer one is that I’d have much more digital fiction, poetry and art to examine, and I’d expect to examine various debates over gender, textual embodiment, and other issues increasingly in contemporary critical theory. Of course, I am particularly eager to see if the promise of XML will be fulfilled.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/internet">internet</a>, <a href="/tags/world-wide-web-0">world wide web</a>, <a href="/tags/www">WWW</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/hyperdcard">hyperdcard</a>, <a href="/tags/html">html</a>, <a href="/tags/xml">xml</a>, <a href="/tags/bbedit">BBEdit</a>, <a href="/tags/dreamweaver">Dreamweaver</a>, <a href="/tags/victorian-web">victorian web</a>, <a href="/tags/thomas-hardy">thomas hardy</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-conrad">joseph conrad</a>, <a href="/tags/john-milton">john milton</a>, <a href="/tags/ted-nelson">Ted Nelson</a>, <a href="/tags/vannevar-bush">vannevar bush</a>, <a href="/tags/microsoft">microsoft</a>, <a href="/tags/netscape">netscape</a>, <a href="/tags/storyspace">Storyspace</a>, <a href="/tags/decameron-web">decameron web</a>, <a href="/tags/marshall-mucluhan">marshall mucluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-joyce">michael joyce</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator887 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comNew Media Studieshttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/introductory
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Scott Rettberg</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-03-28</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>At Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, the administration gives its faculty members very specific titles. One day last fall, I was walking down one of the forking paths that crisscross the campus’s pine barrens and talking with Tom Kinsella, an Associate Professor of British Literature, one of the faculty who served on the search committee that recently hired me as an Assistant Professor of New Media Studies. “So Scott,” Kinsella asked, “I’ve been meaning to ask you - just what is New Media Studies anyway?” I answered, “Well, it’s really too early to give you a definitive answer. But we’re studying the question.”</p>
<p>What do we talk about when we talk about New Media Studies? Certain neologisms leap to mind: hypertext, cybertext, technotext, electronic literature, ‘net art, digital textuality, codework, medial ecology, multimedia, and interactivity – to list a few. But what do we mean by “new” media? We’re usually talking about art, literature, and other kinds of cultural “objects” made for computers and networks. But how long will those new media stay new? At what point will the new media become just-another-media? I wonder if “new media” might soon reach the state in which “postmodernism” now finds itself, having reached the point where, if we all know what we’re talking about when we mention it, it becomes a little awkward to name it out loud. What, after all, comes after post-? How long does the new stay new? Twenty years from now, will the global network still be considered new media?</p>
<p>The first and, essentially, only commercial publisher of hypertext fiction, Eastgate Systems, recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Some of the first-generation hypertexts Eastgate publishes have even made their way into a Norton anthology. The Storyspace interface that many of the early hypertexts were developed in now seems charmingly anachronistic. Whatever else it is, hypertext is clearly no longer avant-garde. Much of the networked multimedia “Writing Beyond Category” that Mark Amerika found on the Web and mentioned in the first New Media Studies focus in <span class="journaltitle">ABR</span> (November/December 2000) still smacks of shocking newness. Although the computer and the network are no longer so new, as the machines become faster and storage cheaper, as the applications become more refined and more robust, and as the communities of artists/writers/producers of new media culture continue to make, collaborate on, distribute, and remix their experiments in network writing, there are few signs that the practitioners of New Media Studies will run out of new work to study any time soon. While the population of fiction writers yearning to get their first publication in <span class="journaltitle">The New Yorker</span> still dwarfs the party of writers hoping to write the Great American Network Novel, and the group of artists hoping to see their ‘net art featured in the next Whitney Biennial is lilliputian in comparison to the number of painters desperate to get their first commissioned gallery show, the question of whether new media writing and Web art are fads is now largely moot. Enough work has been produced that New Media Studies will likely garner at least a chapter in the book of our collective cultural history (or at the very least several hyperlinked footnotes). Although the economic bubble of the Internet’s “new economy” burst some time ago, the culture of the Internet persists, and its artists remain remarkably productive.</p>
<p>Something else is happening as well - while during much of the 90s it seemed as if electronic writing would be represented in “literary culture” as little more than Sven Birkerts’s whipping boy - a sign of the onslaught of the philistine forces of technology against literature-as-we-knew-it - new media is now finding its place within traditional (and new) institutional infrastructures. The fact that there are few commercial venues for electronic literature or digital art aside (and perhaps to the benefit of these new forms as they are freely and openly distributed to a growing audience on the Web), noncommercial Web publishers such as <span class="journaltitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.altx.com">Alt-X</a></span> , <span class="journaltitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Eiareview/mainpages/tirwebhome.htm">The Iowa Review Web</a></span> , <span class="journaltitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.altx.com/ebr">electronic book review</a></span> , <span class="journaltitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com">Beehive</a></span> , <span class="journaltitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.studiocleo.com/cauldron">cauldron &amp; net</a></span> , and others are providing frames for the distribution and critical discussion of new media writing. Nonprofit organizations, such as the Electronic Literature Organization, trAce, and Rhizome, are facilitating the labor of the Web’s cultural producers and helping to promote their work to wider audiences. And, perhaps most importantly for the long-term health of the new media art forms, New Media Studies is finding nests within universities in the US and around the world.</p>
<p>The academic institutionalization of New Media Studies is happening in several disciplines simultaneously - you’ll find it in fine arts programs, communications programs, computer science programs, rhetoric programs, journalism programs, literature programs, and perhaps (finally) even creative writing programs. One of the milestones of the past year was Brown University’s announcement of a graduate fellowship in electronic writing, a long-awaited acknowledgement of the importance of the work that Robert Coover and Robert Arellano have been doing in their electronic writing workshops for the past decade. And while, a decade ago, it would have been possible to study and create new media at only a handful of institutions, many more options are available today, not only in the Ivy League, and not only in flagship institutions such as the University of Colorado, the University of Iowa, and the University of California-Los Angeles, but even in such out-of-the-way locations as Baltimore, southern New Jersey, and Turku, Finland. I think it significant that four of the seven writers of the reviews in this focus (Chris Funkhouser, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Raine Koskimaa, and I) are currently teaching courses in New Media Studies, hypertext, cybertext, or some variation, and that these courses are not oddball one-off topic courses, but components of our programs’ regular curricula: New Media Studies is becoming as ordinary an offering as British Literature.</p>
<p>This cluster of reviews is intended to give its reader some sense of what we talk about when we talk about New Media Studies. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/open-source">Matthew Kirschenbaum</a> reviews what is undoubtedly the most important publication in New Media Studies released this year, <span class="booktitle">The New Media Reader</span>, published by the MIT Press and edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. The <span class="booktitle">Reader</span> is an 800-plus page tome (with CD-ROM) that aggregates articles, papers, and creative work developed in the formative years of the new media from the 1940s until the development of the World Wide Web. The <span class="booktitle">Reader</span> ‘s publication is an important event, as it offers this interdisciplinary field a core reading list, a set of common referents that might serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone as New Media Studies develops across multiple disciplines. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/playful">Raine Koskimaa</a> reviews N. Katherine Hayles’ <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span>, a publication in which the accomplished critic and vocal advocate of electronic literature takes her readers on a tour of her own journey towards an appreciation of the materiality of literature and the possibilities of technotexts. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/superdense">Chris Funkhouser</a> surveys Stephanie Strickland’s <span class="booktitle">V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una</span>. This work by the accomplished print and hypertext poet, author of <span class="booktitle">True North</span> (1997) and “The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot,” marks another milestone – the first time that a major commercial publisher (Penguin) has released a hybrid print-and-electronic work. Scott Hermanson offers a reading of literary critic Joseph Tabbi’s <span class="booktitle">Cognitive Fictions</span>, a work in which Tabbi situates autopoietic fictions within a contemporary media ecology. <span class="lightEmphasis">(This review appears only in the <span class="journaltitle">ABR</span> print version - ed.)</span> The study of digital culture is also within the purview of New Media Studies and, along those lines, <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/petitnarrativ">I</a> provide a reading of David Weinberger’s <span class="booktitle">Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web</span>.</p>
<p>Finally, any treatment of New Media Studies would be lacking without some pointers towards works that are themselves published in the electronic media. Print poet Maureen Seaton offers (in the <span class="journaltitle">ABR</span> print version) an omnibus review of several electronic poems that were featured in the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2002 State of the Arts Symposium Gallery. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/serial">Rob Wittig</a> argues that Justin Hall’s <span class="booktitle">links.net</span>, arguably the first Web log, should be read as literature in the same vein as the correspondence of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.</p>
<p>In keeping with the print-and-electronic hybridization established in several of the works reviewed in this focus, following its print release in <span class="journaltitle">ABR</span>, this cluster of reviews has now been made available online. Supplementing the print-born reviews, the <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> grouping also features original pieces by <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/quilted">Jeff Parker</a> and <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/wrItten">Komninos Zervos</a> on, respectively, the Wardrip-Fruin/Montfort collection, <span class="booktitle">The New Media Reader</span>, and the Hayles/Burdick collaboration, <span class="journaltitle">Writing Machines</span>.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/new-media">new media</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/codework">codework</a>, <a href="/tags/technotext">technotext</a>, <a href="/tags/eastgate-systems">eastgate systems</a>, <a href="/tags/media-ecology">media ecology</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/kirschenbaum">kirschenbaum</a>, <a href="/tags/tabbi">tabbi</a>, <a href="/tags/hermanson">Hermanson</a>, <a href="/tags/funkhouser">Funkhouser</a>, <a href="/tags/weinberger">Weinberger</a>, <a href="/tags/strickland">Strickland</a>, <a href="/tags/new-media-reader">new media reader</a>, <a href="/tags/writing-machines">writing machines</a>, <a href="/tags/cognitive-fictions">cognitive fictions</a>, <a href="/tags/autopoiesis">autopoiesis</a>, <a href="/tags/storyspace">Storyspace</a>, <a href="/tags/avant-gard">avant gard</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator839 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comReading Writing Spacehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/imagenarrative/writingspace
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<div class="markup">by</div>
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<div class="field-item even">Anne Burdick</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Arriving on the literary scene in the early ’90s, Jay David Bolter’s <span class="booktitle">Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing</span> is one of those pro-hypertext books whose earnest boosterism leaves you feeling a little embarassed. Nonetheless, Bolter’s book has recently been seen changing hands around graphic design graduate programs – I once heard it referred to as “the only interesting writing about new media.” While interesting isn’t a word I would use to describe the writing itself, the book does touch upon a central area of interest to graphic designers: the impact of technology on the material embodiment of language (i.e. typography and graphic design). While Bolter’s speculations on the future of electronic writing show their age, (the World Wide Web is conspicuously absent), his reconfiguration of the activity of writing in relation to its “spaces” – past and future – opens the way for an integrated study (and practice?) of writing and design that was previously unimaginable.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Writing Space</span> has two basic premises: (1) writing is a technology for meaning-making via the structure and display of discrete signs – verbal and otherwise; and (2) the writing space, the materials and techniques used to write, determine what can be written and how it will be used and valued by a culture. Bolter examines the impact of the computer on writing, as a technology, object, idea, process, and metaphor. “Electronic writing will be felt across the whole economy and history of writing: this new technology is a thorough rewriting of the writing space” (40). Bolter looks at how the operational attributes of digital space – autonomy! fluidity! speed! – will change not only writing but our conceptions of literacy, human culture, knowledge, and intelligence. He claims that the introduction of the electronic writing space constitutes a technological transformation more powerful than that of the printing press – he likens it to the impact of the phonetic alphabet (42, 50).</p>
<p>Bolter’s argument is centered on the virtues of “electronic writing” – a phrase he uses interchangeably with “hypertext” – which means basically linked chunks of topical information, to the extent that he imagines it. The associative paths of the Internet represent the hypertextual ideal: a network that is infinite (sort of), incomplete, and constantly changing. There are no leftovers from the age of books, no closure nor privileged readings – in the computer, everyone’s an author! A designer too! Reading becomes a kind of writing (and writing becomes a kind of designing), for the reader chooses her own path through a hypertextual world designed/written to be malleable, animated, and visually complex. “True electronic writing is not limited to verbal text: the writeable elements may be words, images, sounds, or even actions that the computer is directed to perform” (26). For the first time in history (or for “the end of history,” as media theorist <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/future-anterior">Friedrich Kittler</a> would say), the writing technology allows the fluid integration of visual, aural, and verbal elements, reconstituting the very definition of writing and – a notion Bolter overlooks – writers.</p>
<p>“The very idea of writing, of semiosis, cannot be separated from the materials and techniques with which we write, and genres and styles of writing are as much determined by technology as other factors” (239-240). Bolter explores how the physical characteristics of our recording devices, from stone and wax tablets to papyrus rolls, the medieval codex, and finally the printed book have “imposed” specific systems for the sequencing and “chunkitizing” (my word) of information. He presents a history of operations that become increasingly complex, making them easier to use (where use = reading+access). Self-contained volumes, encyclopedias, libraries, punctuation, even page numbers are revealed to be not only facilitators for managing text, but technological components as well as philosophical constructs. Writing’s most sophisticated incarnation, the printed book, is the ultimate in standardization, linearity, and univocality.</p>
<p>But the book is maxxed out, Bolter claims. While it may not disappear, it will no longer be the cornerstone in the construction of human culture. The webbed paths, integrated media, and linked communications of hypertext will free us from its binds. Tear down the walls! Connectivity is the future! Hypertextual connections emphasize the in-betweeness of movement and space. The writer and the designer create meaning not by creating objects but by creating relationships. “Electronic writing is both a visual and verbal description. It is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places…” (25). Bolter recognizes the computer as a “diagrammatic space” in which the visible and experiential structures have a rhetorical dimension. As with maps or scientific charts, much of the significant information is in the placement of elements relative to one another. Such visual syntax is no longer beholden to spoken language; the information relayed through structure would be far too cumbersome to verbalize. Additionally, relationships are not always static representations nor are they always seen; many are travelled or encountered. The experiential aspect lies in the moment-to-moment connections, where, as the saying goes, it’s the journey that’s important, not the destination. By writing spaces, graphic designers and writers become tour guides, staging experience and enabling connections.</p>
<p>While Bolter recognizes that visible structures exist in all printed forms, his discussion of “graphic rhetoric” is limited to scientific or mathematical diagrams and charts, the visual equivalent of dry toast. His preoccupation with the book has led him to overlook a rich array of popular forms, perhaps because they are predominantly image-based. From comic books to fashion magazines, Bolter had a plethora of sources with which to compare hypertext’s integration of the visual and the structural. But his lack of breadth limits his thinking, in spite of statements that show promise. “The free combination of words, numbers, and images that is characteristic of the electronic writing space did not begin with the computer; it has been a feature of the best graphics of the last two centuries” (78).</p>
<p>Bolter’s lack of convincing examples is most damaging to his assessment of hypertext’s visual dimension. Using the history of pictographic writing as an entry point for his discussion of visual communication, Bolter has somehow overlooked an entire century’s discourse in art, photography, film, media studies, and design. His crude evaluation of the semiotic capacity of images is limited to those used within standardized writing systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics or contemporary road signs. For Bolter, an image and a sign are mutually exclusive – unless they are icons or, predictably, integrated via hypertext. “In the electronic writing space, picture writing moves back toward the center of literacy” (55). Apparently hypertext has allowed the English department to recuperate the image, but only as an element of writing.</p>
<p>So where does that leave the image-dominant “old” technologies such as film or television? Is Bolter’s proclamation the result of a technological shift or just a shift in perspective? Either way, Bolter gets points for trying: he pulls together elements overlooked by most literature professors when writing to an audience of authors. But he’s only got half the picture. In this way, <span class="booktitle">Writing Space</span> highlights the shortcomings of the industrial era’s division of labor. The old disciplinary boundaries improperly limit writers’ and designers’ (and filmmakers’! and architects’! and computer scientists’! et al’s!) abilities to negotiate the visual/verbal flux of the electronic writing space - or for that matter, of any writing space. By incorporating structures, paths, and images into notions of writing, Bolter has “discovered” what graphic designers have known all along – the material form is a part of the message! Surprisingly – or not – Bolter uses his newfound knowledge to retain the centrality of his position as a writer/author. “[The computer] now offers writers the opportunity both to create their own character fonts and to deploy pictorial elements in new ways” (63).</p>
<p>But Bolter claims typography only to discard it later. His “visual history” of writing – a history that is “no longer appropriate to dismiss” (63) – is basically a cursory review of typographic technologies through the ages, from calligraphy to Linotype. In his view, typography’s prevailing values – transparency and uniformity – have not changed fundamentally since the Enlightenment, when the permanence of print fostered the impulse to create the perfect page. But in the perpetual motion of the electronic writing space, he claims, it barely matters what type looks like! Not only is it bitmapped and coarse, it’s on screen for just a matter of seconds. “Work on computer typography directs our energies away from appreciating the electronic space in its own right – a space in which the subtleties of type size and style may no longer be important to the writer’s or the reader’s vision of the text” (67-68). But don’t type size and style constitute anyone’s “vision” of the text? By reducing typographic issues to typographic principles that only apply to the printed page, Bolter retains his status as master of the new realm but mistakenly erases a key element of the visual communication he champions. “The computer encourages the democratic feeling among its users that they can serve as their own designers… This new technology thus merges the role of writer and typographer that had been separate from the outset of the age of print” (66).</p>
<p>The ramifications of this significant change have yet to play out in a sophisticated or compelling manner, due to the very prejudices and boundaries leftover from print and exemplified by Bolter (in spite of how he positions himself). If writing is to move beyond the strictly verbal, it’s worth asking who the new writers are going to be. Is Bolter expanding the domain of traditional writers or is he opening the way for surprising new hybrids and inclusive collaborations?</p>
<p>Apparently, the former, as evidenced by the accompanying hypertext of <span class="booktitle">Writing Space</span> that is available on disk. Created in a program called Storyspace that Bolter co-wrote with <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/tropical">Michael Joyce</a> and John B. Smith, the hypertext version contains digressions and elaborations too unruly to be contained in the book, which is perhaps its most interesting attribute. I spent about two hours clicking my way through its tunnel of page screens, one at a time. I felt trapped in an anemic textual void. The screen, a surprisingly static white rectangle, contained paragraph-length chunks of text peppered with hyperlinks and icons for forward and back, giving the whole experience a mundane sameness. The jumps between chunks just weren’t enough, regardless of how many choices I was given. Taking into account that it was created six or seven years ago – and that it fit on one tiny disk – I didn’t exactly expect an action flick. Nonetheless, the semantic capacity of the structure was severely limited; had there been visible juxtapositions such as, say, five page screens open at once, the hypertext would have kept its vow to move “beyond” the possibilities of the book. For a fluid medium that promises the future, Bolter’s use of it was a big disappointment.</p>
<p>Perhaps, then, the most significant contribution of <span class="booktitle">Writing Space</span> is its title. To conceive of the objects that graphic designers design as spaces for writing – or better yet, as spaces that are written, written in, and written to – reveals the ineluctable connection between the designer’s actions and communication’s outcome. “The organization of writing, the style of writing, the expectations of the reader – all these are affected by the physical space the text occupies” (85).</p>
<p>The transparency of print’s established structures has fostered the illusion that communication consists of words alone. We have become so used to writing to the page that we seldom realize how extremely rigid and specific its characteristics are. By contrast, when writing and designing to electronic space it becomes impossible to overlook the impact and attributes of the spaces we actively create, due primarily to the absence of conventions. Structuring this seemingly fluid and dynamic environment, shaping it and setting limits, can feel like a bold and violent act. By writing spaces, designers are in effect “writing” content, not by choosing the words themselves, but by setting the parameters by which the words will be chosen, choreographing relationships between visual, verbal, and aural elements, and staging the reader’s experience through pacing and range of movement.</p>
<p>If anything, Bolter’s book reinforces the fact that in any writing space, writing and design cannot be neatly separated out, and that in the electronic writing space in particular, they must, by necessity, work in tandem. Now more than ever we need an integrated study of the history and future of visible language. Unfortunately, Bolter’s isn’t it.</p>
<p class="epigraph">This essay first appeared in <span class="booktitle">Emigre</span> #40, Fall 1996. Reprinted by permission.</p>
<p>[ <span class="lightEmphasis">Bolter’s collaborative <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/archival">Remediation</a> (1998) is reviewed by Matt Kirschenbaum in ebr, eds.</span> ]</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/anne-burdick">anne burdick</a>, <a href="/tags/jay-david-bolter">jay david bolter</a>, <a href="/tags/j-david-bolter">j. david bolter</a>, <a href="/tags/media">media</a>, <a href="/tags/design">design</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/kittler">kittler</a>, <a href="/tags/storyspace">Storyspace</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-joyce">michael joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/john-b-smith">john b. smith</a>, <a href="/tags/typography">typography</a>, <a href="/tags/kirschenbaum">kirschenbaum</a>, <a href="/tags/grusin">grusin</a>, <a href="/tags/baetans">baetans</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator775 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com